Henry and Lane

Henry tells Rory that he tried to call Lane once, and Mrs Kim answered, frightening him so much that he never phoned again. This doesn’t quite tally with what Lane told Rory: that Henry rang once and got the answering machine, leaving a message that she listened to again and again before eventually breaking the machine. Perhaps Henry only counts the call where someone answered the phone (which Lane doesn’t know about since her mother took the call).

It is now nearly three months since Henry and Lane first met at Madeline’s party. That’s a long time for Henry to remain interested without doing anything, and he’s taken ages to talk to Rory about the situation. Perhaps he is as unused to dealings with the opposite sex as Lane – certainly they both seem to have made a bit of a mess of this situation.

Rory hasn’t been a real help either; she lives in the same town as Lane and goes to school with Henry, so couldn’t she at least have passed notes and letters between the two of them, or driven Lane into Hartford to see Henry? (Maybe even organised a Trigonometry tutoring class that Lane and Henry could have both joined!)

To be fair, Rory didn’t rely on Lane to fix her relationship problems with Dean, but Rory has a bit more experience with boys, much more freedom, and a generally far easier life than Lane.

“He’s playing softball”

RORY: Let’s go …Wedding dress shopping …
LORELAI: Uh, you need to see Dean.
RORY: He’s playing softball.

We know from Christopher Returns that Dean plays softball on Saturday mornings, so this looks to be the very next day after the previous episode, and the fight that Rory had with her grandfather. Rory doesn’t seem to be upset any more, so perhaps her grandfather rang her almost immediately after she got home to apologise, as Emily told him to.

“Putin arms race thing”

RORY (while reading Lorelai’s newspaper veil): Wait, don’t move.
LORELAI: Rory, stop it.
RORY: This Putin arms race thing is really getting crazy.

In June 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the Bush administration’s proposed national missile defence system could trigger an arms race, as he had no option but to upgrade his own country’s nuclear forces. In real life, this was reported on June 18 2001, which is later than it appears to be in this episode, as Lorelai’s June 21 engagement party is still some time away.

Saturday 21st

SOOKIE (on phone to Emily): Listen, I’m sorry to call so late, but I need to ask you a question. I’m planning a surprise wedding shower for Lorelai and Max, and it’s gonna be more like a big party actually. But I’ve cleared the date with everybody around here, so we’re all set to go, but I wanted to make sure you guys were gonna be around before I finalised everything. It’s going to be Saturday the 21st.

The surprise wedding shower for Lorelai and Max is planned for June 21; this is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and traditionally the high point of summer. It is a symbolic day to celebrate an engagement, when the sun is at its zenith, and there is more light available than any other day. Traditionally, the time around the summer solstice is associated with love and fertility.

In real life, June 21 was a Thursday, not a Saturday, in 2001.

Because of Sookie’s phone call, where she discovered that Lorelai had got engaged without telling her parents, a distressed Emily orders Richard to apologise to Rory. She is afraid that if they push Rory away as they did with Lorelai, that they will lose her as well, and the thought is unbearable to her.

This will set up a pattern where Richard and Emily try to treat Rory as differently from Lorelai as possible. They were strict and even harsh with Lorelai, but Rory the angel child will receive little else but praise and indulgence, for fear that if she doesn’t get her way in all things, she will become another Lorelai and escape. Whether this plan is a good one for Rory’s character and independence is never questioned.

Mencken’s Chrestomathy

EMILY: Richard, don’t you dare get on that phone. They’ll be here any second.
RICHARD: I’m not getting on the phone. I’m going to give Rory that first edition of Mencken’s Chrestomathy.

Mencken’s Chrestomathy was earlier discussed as a book that Richard called Rory about after they first bonded at Richard’s country club. A first edition is difficult to find and would most likely cost more than $100 today.

The special family dinner may be Friday June 1, meaning that the school year just finished for Rory, and they are celebrating the end of her first year at Chilton, and the success she attained during it.

I Found Love

This 1968 love song by sunshine pop group The Free Design plays during the first scene. The centre of town is covered in yellow daisies, and Lorelai and Rory are crossing the street together, showing their transition from single status to coupledom.

I Found Love is the eighth track on the band’s album You Could Be Born Again. Although The Free Design did not gain much recognition during their career, they had something of a revival in the mid-1990s and were influential on later acts – including Beck, previously discussed as one of Lane’s favourite musical artists.

We know that Season Two opens on the day after Season One ended, because Lorelai later tells Miss Patty that the proposal was the night before. We also know it’s a Saturday, because Rory isn’t in school, which means Season One ended on a Friday.

“Have a really good summer”

PARIS: Too bad I already filled the spot for music coverage. You know, record reviewing and such. You’d have been perfect for it. I gave the job to Louise.
RORY: Louise owns two CDs.
PARIS: Yeah. Well, gotta go. Have a really good summer.

Paris makes it sound as if it is now the last day of the school year, which I guess it could be if the episode covered more than a month, but that doesn’t explain how Rory is back at school again later in the episode (and doesn’t fit with how this episode is dated in a future season). More likely she means the summer vacation is very soon, or perhaps that regular classes are about to end to make way for the final exams schedule.

As Rory looks back at Paris, Madeline, Louise, who began the school year as her enemies, became her friends, and are now suddenly enemies again at the end of the school year, they stand on the steps in a manner reminiscent of an iconic scene in the film Heathers, previously discussed. It’s a clear sign that they are back to being a gang of “mean girls” again.

The Troubadour at the Town Meeting

TROUBADOUR: I’ve been the town troubadour for six months now, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job and then, he shows up (points to other troubadour).
RIVAL TROUBADOUR: Hey.
TROUBADOUR: And there’s no room for a second troubadour in Stars Hollow.

Even though we’ve only seen the Town Troubadour since That Damn Donna Reed, which took place in February, he’s actually been in town since early November at least. We learn that the Troubadour is a real man of mystery, as we don’t know how he supports himself. He doesn’t play music in the streets for money, even refusing it when offered.

Nor do we know where he lives: he is never shown shopping or eating at the diner, and nobody seems to know anything about him, so he isn’t a regular part of the town. On the other hand, we never see him driving, cycling, catching a bus, or even walking home, so we don’t know where he goes when he finishes playing music in Stars Hollow. This is all part of the “mystique” that he believes troubadours are meant to have.

Is he even human? Is he an angel, or a spirit from the stars, sent to bring music to Stars Hollow? Is he from another dimension, or the real Grant Lee Phillips able to project himself somehow into the Gilmore Girls universe? These questions will never be answered.

His role seems to be to guide people’s lives through song, and to help them learn to express emotions – all part of Stars Hollow being a place where love can be nurtured and developed. Later in the scene, Rory stands up and says that the Troubadour is able to express how the townspeople feel through his songs, and to say what they are thinking. This certainly seems to be case in this episode.

(Interestingly, the Troubadour only seems to have come to Stars Hollow when Rory had begun dating Dean, and Lorelai had begun dating Max. Did their love affairs attract him to the town, as if they now needed his emotional guidance?)

Max at the Town Meeting

LORELAI: Are you sure you wanna go to this thing?
MAX: You’ve been talking about these town meetings for months. I’ve got to see one for myself.

With Max attending a town meeting in Stars Hollow with Lorelai and Rory, you can see that he is trying to adapt to her world, and become a member of her family. We know this was his idea, because he says that he felt that he had to attend a meeting since Lorelai talked about them all the time. Lorelai appears rather reluctant, as if she is not sure about having Max become part of her everyday life so quickly.

Town meetings seem to be held on the second Thursday of the month, so this could be Thursday 10 May.

“Mopy, Dopey, and about twelve other melancholy dwarves “

LANE: I love you, but you’ve been Mopey, Dopey, and about twelve other melancholy dwarves for the past five weeks, and I miss the old Rory.

Lane is referring to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a 1937 animated musical film made by Walt Disney, and based on the German fairy tale told by the Brothers Grimm. It was the first full-length animated feature film, and the earliest feature film made by Walt Disney.

There is a dwarf named Dopey in the film, but the other dwarfs are named Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Doc.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the #1 film of 1937, and audiences loved it so much that many gave the film a standing ovation, while critics hailed it as a piece of art. It received an Honorary Academy Award as a “significant screen innovation”, with Disney receiving one normal-sized Oscar statuette and seven small ones. The film gave Disney the green light to produce further animated features, and inspired MGM to produce its own fantasy movie, The Wizard of Oz.

Snow White was re-released in cinemas in 1993, when Lane and Rory were nine, and came out on video the following year; either year may have been when they first saw it.

It is actually almost six weeks since Rory and Dean broke up, but at five weeks and six days, this is one of the more accurate pieces of timing given in the first season of Gilmore Girls.