The song Miss Patty and Babette together at the wedding, while Morey plays piano. It’s a popular 1950 song by Irving Berlin, first performed by Ethel Merman and Russell Nype in the Broadway musical Call Me Madam; Merman later reprised her role for the 1953 film version, featuring the song as a duet with Donald O’Connor [pictured]. The song has been recorded several times, most successfully by Perry Como and the Fontana Sisters, who reached #5 in the charts for 1950.
The lyrics of the song give the message, You’re not sick, you’re just in love – a callback to Rory crying that she must be “sick” to have cut school to see Jess in New York. Now Lorelai has done something even more questionable, and the song is telling the Gilmore girls (and Jess?) that they’re not sick in the head, they are simply in love.
LORELAI: Twelve, including a few bars of “I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean”.
One of the songs from Brigadoon. The song is sung by Brigadoon villager Charlie Dalrymple, who marries fellow villager Jean McLaren in a traditional Highland celebration. The connection with weddings is presumably what puts it in Lorelai’s mind.
CHRISTOPHER: Please, I saw what your face was doing … It was counting up how many Brigadoon references you could come up with to torture him with at a later date.
Brigadoon, a 1954 musical film directed by Vicente Minelli, based on the 1949 Broadway musical of the same name by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The film stars Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, and Cyd Charisse and is about two American tourists on a hunting trip in Scotland who get lost in the woods and discover a miraculous village named Brigadoon, which rises out of the mists for one day every hundred years.
The film received lacklustre reviews and failed at the box office – unlike the stage musical, which was a big success.
RORY: I guess the thought of just being nice to people never occurred to you, huh?
PARIS: See, that is exactly what I need from you, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm for the new millennium. Hey, wear some braids tomorrow with bows. I mean, hell, let’s sell it, sister!
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a 1903 classic children’s book by Kate Douglas Wiggin. The main character is Rebecca Rowena Randall, an imaginative and charming little girl from a poor family, sent to live with her aunts, Miranda and Jane Sawyer, in the fictional village of Riverboro, Maine. Miranda is stern with Rebecca, while Jane is kindly and finds Rebecca’s lively nature refreshing. However, Aunt Miranda will eventually prove how much she values Rebecca.
Like Rory, Rebecca is a brunette from a small town, and eventually becomes a very good student, especially in English, as well as talented writer.
The book was turned into a stage play, and was made into a film three times, most notably in 1938, starring Shirley Temple. However, Paris seems to be describing the book rather than a film, as the films don’t show Rebecca with the braids and bows of the book, preferring curly-headed heroines.
LORELAI: Yeah, I never leave home without all the essentials: mirror, makeup, picture of Shaun Cassidy.
Shaun Cassidy (born 1958), singer, actor, writer, and producer. He is the son of Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones and Tony Award-winning actor Jack Cassidy, the half-brother of David Cassidy from The Partridge Family, and the brother of actor Patrick Cassidy.
While still in high school, he signed a record contract and forged a career as a teen pop idol. His biggest hit was “Da Doo Ron Ron”, which went to #1 in 1977. At the same time, he starred in The Hardy Boys Mysteries on television, and had a role on General Hospital.
During the 1980s and 1990s he concentrated on stage acting, performing on Broadway and in the West End. He wrote his first television pilot in 1995 while appearing in Blood Brothers on Broadway alongside David Cassidy, and has gone on to have a successful career as a screenwriter and TV producer.
Lorelai implies she had a crush on Shaun Cassidy when she was a little girl, although also, a bit oddly, that her make-up routine dates to the same period, when she would have been aged 8 to 12. This actually makes more sense for someone Amy Sherman-Palladino’s age, as she would have been around 14 at the end of Cassidy’s pop star career.
This is the book Jess is reading in this episode, that he tells Luke is not for school.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1969 semi-autobiographical science-fiction anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. The story, told in a non-linear fashion by an unreliable narrator, relates the life and experiences of a man from upstate New York named Billy Pilgrim, from his early years to his service during World War II, and post-war years – his experiences include time travel and alien abduction. The book centres on Billy’s capture by the German Army, and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war.
Categorised as a postmodern, metafictional novel, it is characterised by Vonnegut’s signature style, with simple sentences underpinning a text of irony, sentimentality, black humour, and instruction. The short, declarative sentences give the impression of reading a factual report, while the focus shifts between the writer’s perspective as someone who met Billy Pilgrim to an omniscient third person narrator. The first sentence is, “All this happened, more or less”. It is considered one of the best first lines in American fiction. The sentence, “So it goes”, is used as a repetitive refrain throughout.
Slaughterhouse-Five received mostly positive reviews, and became a bestseller, staying on the New York Times Bestseller List for sixteen weeks. It has been adapted for stage and radio, and been turned into both a film and a graphic novel.
The novel is controversial, with many attempts of censorship against it, especially in school and college libraries. This makes Jess’ reading of it at school seem like a deliberate attempt to draw attention to himself. A story about someone who has been through terrible trauma until they find life meaningless seems to be something which Jess relates to.
PARIS: I’m sorry, group leader, could you ask the Pigeon sisters if there is a point to this opus?
The Pigeon sisters are characters from the film The Odd Couple, previously mentioned. They are English sisters named Cecily and Gwendolyn Pigeon who live in the same building as Felix and Oscar. They were played by cousins Monica Evans and Carole Shelley in the original Broadway play, the film, and the 1970 sit-com, although their roles were gradually phased out in the television show.
The Pigeon sisters are friendly, flirtatious, ditzy, and as their name suggests, slightly bird-brained, rather like Louise and Madeline. Paris has no problem tearing down her friends in public; no wonder that Rory isn’t sure whether Paris is her friend or not.
An opus is an artistic work, especially one on a grand scale.
LORELAI: Forever. Godot was just here. He said ‘I ain’t waiting for Richard,’ grabbed a roll, and left. It’s been forever.
A reference to Waiting for Godot, a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, originally written in French in 1948-49 (title: En attendant Godot). The French play had its premiere in Paris in 1953, and Beckett’s English translation of his own play premiered in London in 1955.
In the play two characters named Vladimir and Estragon engage in a number of discussions and encounters while they wait for the Godot of the title, who never turns up. It has been voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century.
TROUBADOUR #2: Don’t like to be touched, that’s cool. Got a little David and Lisa thing happening?
David and Lisa, 1962 drama film directed by Frank Perry. It is based on the second story in the 1961 novella Lisa and David by a psychiatrist named Theodore Isaac Rubin; the screenplay is written by Rubin’s wife, Eleanor Katz. The story is about a bright young man named David (played by Keir Dullea) who cannot bear to be touched; while in a mental health treatment facility, he befriends a girl named Lisa (played by Janet Margolin) who has a split personality.
David and Lisa received positive reviews from critics. It was made into a stage play in 1967, and into a television film in 1998, produced by Oprah Winfrey.
Note the implication from the Second Town Troubadour/Second Market Guy that Taylor must have serious mental health problems if he doesn’t want to be hugged. It’s just the start of the trolling that Taylor is about to be subjected to!
LORELAI: Rory, you have to do something bad when Mommy’s out of town … . how about a floating craps game or something?
Craps is a dice game where players wage bets based on the outcome of rolling a pair of dice. A “floating craps game” is an illegal operation, so called because operators use portable tables and equipment to quickly move the game’s location, thus staying ahead of legal authorities. The 1950 musical Guys and Dolls features a floating craps game.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 