The show ends with another Friday Night Dinner – not the one immediately after the Thursday night scene at Stars Hollow High School, but the following one, more than a week later. Lorelai tells Emily that work began on the house the previous morning, so that we know they have already done the termite fumigation, and everything is on track for their house to be fully repaired.
Getting a house’s foundation repaired usually takes about three days, so it might be be finished over the weekend. Even allowing for extra time because the damage was so extensive, we can feel confident that Lorelai’s house will be completely fixed by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest (in time for the next episode!).
LORELAI: Oh, but I am good for the money. I, uh, pay off all my debts and I work really hard. I’ve been the executive manager of the Independence Inn for the last four years now.
We now learn that Lorelai has been the executive manager at the Independence Inn since early 1998. We don’t know what her position was before that, but the pay was good enough that Lorelai was able to buy a house even before her promotion.
While Lorelai is doing her homework for business school in the diner, Rory comes in, clutching her PSAT results. It’s four-thirty, but somehow Rory is already back from school, which gets out at 4.05 pm and is forty minutes away, gone home to get their mail, and walked to the diner to meet her mother, all within twenty-five minutes. But let’s ignore yet another time zone issue.
The SAT is a standardised test widely used for college admissions in the US, in use since 1926. Originally the Scholastic Aptitude Test, its name has changed several times, and by now it isn’t an acronym of anything – everyone just knows that SAT means the test to get into college.
The PSAT is the Preliminary SAT, which high school students take in early to mid-October – Rory probably took hers in the period between Presenting Lorelai Gilmore and Like Mother Like Daughter.
Taking the PSAT is said to improve your scores when taking the SAT, and furthermore, the top scorers are rewarded with scholarships, so they are considered to be very important.
Results of the PSAT are usually mailed out perhaps six to eight weeks after the taking the test, so in the real world, Rory would have already had her results by late January.
Rather than trudging home through the snow carrying their bags, Lorelai organises a sleigh ride home for she and Rory (and none of their friends, like Luke or Sookie or Dean or Lane … but maybe she didn’t want to seem like she was playing favourites, or the company would only allow one sleigh ride home). I’m not sure how they got to the inn with their bags in the first place. Perhaps someone gave them a lift?
The Bracebridge Dinner was originally going to be held on a Thursday night, and that would mean this was Friday morning, and Rory should be going to school. It’s likely it was moved to the Friday (meaning that it replaced the usual Friday Night Dinner with Emily and Richard), and it’s now Saturday morning and Rory is on her break. It can’t have been a weekend night, because Dean and Lane went to school the same day as the Bracebridge Dinner.
RICHARD: Oh, that awful woman. Who is she? The tall bony one, married to the deceased mustachioed congressman. RORY: Cher? EMILY: That’s the one! LORELAI: The year of “do you believe in life after love?”.
Cher’s single Believe was released in October 1998, the title track from her album of the same name. The chorus begins: “Do you believe in life after love?”. A departure from her usual style, it’s an upbeat dance-pop number which heavily features Auto-Tune, then a new software; for some time Auto-Tune was known as “the Cher effect”.
The song went to #1 world-wide, making Cher (then 52) the oldest female artist to reach the Billboard Hot 100, while Believe was the highest-selling single by a female artist in the UK. One of the best-selling singles of all time, Believe won a Grammy for Best Dance Recording that year. It is considered to be one of the most iconic songs of the 1990s, and one of the best dance tracks ever released. Rolling Stone has it listed as both one of the greatest songs of all time, and one of the most annoying.
Cher is tall with a strong bone structure, and from 1964 to 1975 was married to Sonny Bono, a Republican congressman in California from 1995 until his death in 1998.
Lorelai’s statement tells us that Richard and Emily went to Prague in December 1998. Although Richard cannot identify the song by Cher, Lorelai can guess because she knows it was such a huge hit that year.
LORELAI (to Richard): You and Mom, you always go out of town this time of year. RORY: Last year it was the Bahamas.
Last year we discovered it was Richard and Emily’s annual tradition to hold a Christmas party in mid-December. This year we discover another tradition: they go out of town around Christmas time (presumably after the party, but possibly before).
I’m not sure whether they actually go away for Christmas, or if they travel in the week or so before Christmas, and get back in time for the 25th. Richard and Emily spoke about only seeing Lorelai and Rory at Christmas and Easter, so did that just mean attending the Christmas party each year? As that was attended by their friends, it doesn’t seem as if they spent much time together as a family at all, even in the holidays. Perhaps they meant the entire Christmas season – the party, and then Christmas itself.
Richard and Emily went to the Bahamas in December 2000, after Richard had been hospitalised for an angina attack. As Christopher’s parents, Straub and Francine Hayden, live in the Bahamas, it seems very likely the Gilmores either stayed with them, or visited them, during their vacation. It was only a couple of months later that Christopher’s parents come to Hartford just as Christopher arrives for a visit to Stars Hollow, suggesting it was a plan that the elder Gilmores cooked up to bring Lorelai and Christopher together – with devastating results.
LORELAI: Taking pity on your burger? RORY: Not hungry. LORELAI: Honey, you’ve got to eat. You’re gonna kill yourself in a couple of hours, you really need your strength.
The timeline of this episode, already fairly wonky with a week that seems to have gone missing, goes completely bazonkers on the day of the final rehearsal. Rehearsal starts at 5 pm, and Lorelai says Rory has to kill herself “in a couple of hours” (yet another suicide joke in the show). So it seems as if it is 3 pm, and they are eating mid-afternoon burgers, perhaps a late lunch.
Yet not long afterwards, Lorelai makes plans for them to go shopping that afternoon, as if it’s midday, then Paul and his parents come in for breakfast. Lorelai and Rory are eating burgers for breakfast??? They always have eggs or pancakes on a weekend (muffins if they’re not hungry), they’ve never had breakfast hamburgers before. Is this brunch or a second breakfast or an early lunch? What the dink time is it?
RORY: I know you hate it. DEAN: Yeah, I hate it. I really hate it. RORY: But we do the scene on Sunday, and then it’s over.
When Professor Anderson gave them the project, she said it would be performed Sunday week (not the next Sunday, but the one after). Suddenly, the project is due that Sunday – only a few days away. It doesn’t seem like enough time to get everything done. I’ve tried to construct a timeline where most of the first week is skipped over, but it doesn’t quite work, and also runs into Thanksgiving.
LORELAI: Okay, once again, I bring up the fact that this is a wedding present, and as I am not getting married, neither God’s law nor Emily Post allows me to keep this … SOOKIE: [Martha Stewart] said that if it arrives after ten weeks … RORY: Eight. SOOKIE: …eight weeks, that you don’t have to return it.
Emily Post and Martha Stewart, both previously discussed. The program that Sookie watched was Martha Stewart Living.
There is, of course, no such “wriggle room” rule in etiquette (Sookie and Rory invented it because they want the ice cream maker). If your wedding is cancelled, you return all the gifts, no matter how late they arrive (unless the sender specifically tells you to keep it, which does sometimes happen).
However, if a gift arrives with no name attached to it, then there is little you can do, because it’s considered even ruder to ring around and ask people if they sent such-and-such (it seems like you’re criticising them for not sending it, and assume they are too dim-witted to attach a name to it). You could try to find out the sender by calling the company who delivered it, but after that there’s not much you can do. If conscience smites you, you can always donate it to charity, or sell it and donate the money.
Lorelai must surely suspect her mother of sending it, yet she’s the one person that Lorelai doesn’t ask, as if she doesn’t want to know.
Sookie says it is more than ten weeks since the wedding was cancelled, and Rory corrects her to more than eight weeks. In fact, it is just over twelve weeks since Lorelai and Max’s wedding was meant to take place.
SOOKIE: Jackson just got in his apple crop! We can make cider ice cream!
The apple season finishes in Connecticut at the end of October at the latest, and it now seems to be around the middle of November. I think Sookie must mean that Jackson actually got his crop in some weeks earlier, especially as she’s planning on using cider, which takes at least two weeks to make.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 