Footnotes to the TV series
EMILY: So how long have you been with this woman?
CHRISTOPHER: Eight months.
Christopher has supposedly been going out with Sherry since July 2001. Something he didn’t bother sharing with Lorelai and Rory until nearly three months later – and only then because they contacted him. Without Lorelai calling him, would Christopher have remained in contact with them at all, or disappeared to Boston to lead a new life with Sherry?
SHERRY: So we’ll swing by around six?
RORY: Oh, sounds good.
The debate at Chilton started at 3.30 pm, and presumably finished no earlier than 4.05 pm, the end of the school day. Lorelai and Rory talked to Christopher and Sherry after the debate, and then they had a half-hour drive back to Stars Hollow. Say they got home at 4.45 pm, and have entertained Christopher and Sherry for about half an hour, it should be around 5.15 pm by now. Christopher and Sherry now have 45 minutes to drive back to Litchfield, get ready to go out, then drive back to Stars Hollow. Assuming a 20 minute travel time between Litchfield and Stars Hollow (the distance between Litchfield and Waterbury, and Litchfield and Washington Depot), they have only five minutes to get ready before getting back in the car.
It is very, very tight, but unlike other fantasy timescales in Gilmore Girls, this one is actually doable. Just.
RORY: We have leftover Halloween candy.
This really seems to be confirmation that Lorelai and Rory aren’t that greedy. Halloween was four months ago, and they haven’t even eaten all their candy yet. They do have a real problem throwing food out, though. Old candy doesn’t sound nice-tasting or safe to eat.
Rory got a pager message from Dean while she was at dinner, but instead of phoning him back right away, she called Lane’s house (Lane didn’t come to the phone). When she gets home, Lorelai goes for a shower, telling Rory to find a movie for them to watch. It was after 9 pm when they were at dinner, and they talked more and had a half hour drive home, so it must be around 10 pm by now, yet they’re planning to watch a movie as well!
Instead of getting a movie, or phoning Dean back, Rory calls Jess. When we see him, he is reading The Fountainhead, as instructed by Rory. He is also playing with Rory’s bracelet, gazing at it softly with a misty smile. The phone call, ostensibly about literature, is very playful, and this episode marks the beginning of Jess and Rory’s mutual flirtation.
And Rory is still clearly very annoyed by Dean going to Lorelai when they had an issue in their relationship, because she isn’t returning his calls.
LORELAI: Well, last year Roy Wilkins bought it and I got my sprinklers fixed for half price … And this year my rain gutters are completely clogged, and I thought if I could get the Collins kid to bite, I’d get that taken care of.
We learn that the previous year, in 2001, a man named Roy Wilkins bought Lorelai’s basket at the fundraiser, and she was charming enough to him that he fixed her sprinklers and only charged half price for it. This year, she was hoping that “the Collins kid” might buy her and be inveigled into cleaning her gutters for cheap or free.
“The Collins kid” could be in his early twenties, I don’t suppose Lorelai would picnic with a literal child? Although considering how the town laughed at her for going on one date with someone in his early-to-mid twenties, you’d think she’d be wary of that now.
It sounds as if since becoming a homeowner, Lorelai has been using the Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser as a way to get free or cheap home repairs or home maintenance done. Hmm, you know who is really good at handyman stuff? Luke! And now she’s having a picnic with him.
DEAN: So buck tradition.
RORY: Are you kidding? Do you remember how mad Taylor was when I was sick and I couldn’t go to the turkey-calling contest?
Turkey calling is a type of contest held in North America, where contestants must try to mimic the sound of a turkey so successfully that judges cannot tell the difference between the human and a real turkey. They may use their voice (“natural turkey calling”), or use instruments made of wood, glass, metal, etc, and must perform five different calls.
Turkey calling contests are usually held during the turkey hunting season, in the fall, with Thanksgiving providing a natural occasion to include one. The other season for turkey calling contests is the spring, during the turkey mating season.
If Stars Hollow holds theirs at Thanksgiving, it isn’t mentioned in the Thanksgiving episode we see (that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen offscreen, of course). Also, Rory wasn’t sick the previous Thanksgiving – she seemed fine at the Chilton play, which occurred around the same time. That means that if it’s held at Thanksgiving, Rory must have been sick at Thanksgiving 2000, which took place between “Love and War and Snow” and “Rory’s Dance”. She and Dean had just begun dating then, so he would be able to remember her being too sick to participate.
Another possibility is that it’s part of the Autumn Festival, in early November. Rory wasn’t sick for the 2000 one, but is just possible she was sick the previous year, in 2001. We see her just before and after the festival but not on the day itself, so if she was sick, it would have just been a 24-hour bug (food poisoning from leftovers???).
This is the first mention we get of Taylor apparently insisting that Rory participate in every Stars Hollow activity, even though she didn’t go on the teen hayride in the pilot episode. It puts a slightly sinister spin on the enforced fun that Rory seems to have been pressured into.
RORY: It’s tradition.
DEAN: I don’t believe this.
RORY: It’s true. My mother and I have been doing this every year since we moved here.
We now know that Lorelai has been taking part in the Bid-a-Basket Fundraiser since 1987, even though she was a maid at the inn at the time, and had only been in Stars Hollow for a few months. It seems she became heavily involved in the town almost immediately.
Rory says she has also been taking part since she arrived in town too, but she was only a toddler. Perhaps she means that she accompanied Lorelai on her picnic lunch dates, as a sort of chaperone to make sure things could never get too romantic, and because Lorelai either didn’t want to leave her with a babysitter, or had no babysitting options.
It’s unclear at what age Rory was deemed old enough to take part in the fundraiser with her own basket, but most likely not until she was sixteen and had a boyfriend to buy her basket. That would be since the previous year, 2001. So Rory’s grand “tradition” has probably been going for a whole twelve months.
It’s also “tradition” for the woman to bake a delicious picnic lunch, but Lorelai and Rory don’t bother sticking to that tradition. There’s so many places that Dean could poke holes in Rory’s narrative or call her out, but he never does.
LANE: Well, I invited my cousin David to come and bid on my basket, you know, to keep my mother happy … Then when he gets it, we tell my mom we’re gonna go eat over at the park, where Henry’s gonna call on the pay phone at exactly two o’clock for the ‘all is clear’ sign. Then David, with the twenty bucks I give him, will disappear, Henry will arrive, and we’ll finally have our first official date.
With a dating plan this complex and filled with shenanigans, what could possibly go wrong? Henry met Lane in March 2001, so he’s been waiting nearly a year for his first date! And it’s ridiculously complicated. You have to give him points for incredible patience and understanding with Lane’s situation.
LORELAI: You know what’s wonderful about this festival? … That it always falls on the day after trash day. Therefore, all the stuff that you forgot to throw out that you would normally be stuck with for another whole week, you can instead put in a pretty basket and auction off for charity.
The Bid-a-Basket Fundraiser is on a Sunday, so now we know the trash is collected on Saturday in Stars Hollow.
The show opens the day before the Stars Hollow Bid-on-a-Basket Fundraiser, with signs telling the viewer that bidders can win themselves a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch, that it’s held on Sunday at midday, and that all proceeds go to the Stars Hollow Retirement Home (the signs are sponsored by Doose’s Market). Across the street at the market, baskets are on sale, and more signs tell us that it’s also known as the Bid-on-a-Basket Festival. We can see a woman leaving with her new basket.
Inside the market, Lorelai and Rory are shopping for their own baskets, but of course they don’t intend to cook a delicious home-cooked picnic lunch (or even make Sookie do it for them, like they did for the bake sale). They’re just going to put old leftovers in their baskets – as we now know they keep leftovers for a long time, it’s sounding like a Salmonella Festival for anyone bidding on their baskets!
These type of fundraisers are called “box socials” and were common in the 19th century and 1900s, with women cooking the food and packing it into a box or basket, and men bidding for them. Although it was meant to be a “blind” auction, married and attached women would let their husband or sweetheart know which basket was theirs, so they could bid on it – bidding on a woman’s basket was a way to let her know you were interested in more than her home cooking.
Box socials are also low-key dating auctions, with the winning bidder not only getting the basket, but the chance to share the picnic lunch with the lady who provided it. A lunch basket auction of this type features in the 2001 YA novel Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen (in this case, it is a high school boy who provides the basket, and girls bid on the chance to have lunch with him). This seems like a bit of a coincidence, or perhaps merely zeitgeist.
Although Flipped is set in the 1990s, when it was made into a film in 2010, they set it in the 1960s, as if that scene was deemed too old-fashioned to be believable. They must have agreed with Lorelai, who complained that the concept was “backwards”. In fact there has been a mild resurgence in box socials since the 1990s.
The show never makes it explicit, but according to the timeline, the Bid-on-Basket Fundraiser seems to be held in mid-February, and it would make sense if it was the Sunday after Valentine’s Day. That’s a clear connection with love and romance, although it isn’t practical at all to have a picnic in winter! In real life it would be freezing.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 