Denny’s

RORY: So do I look older?
LORELAI: Oh, yeah. You walk into Denny’s before five, you’ve got yourself a discount.

Denny’s is a chain of American diner-style table-service restaurants that are open all the time, not closing at night or on holidays unless forced to by state or local regulations. Founded in 1953, there are more than a thousand Denny’s restaurants in the United States. There is a Denny’s in Hartford that Rory could walk into before five o’clock.

Some Denny’s restaurants do give senior discounts, but as they are franchised there is no across-the-board senior discount program. I can’t find anything about them giving senior discounts before 5 (is that am or pm?). They do have a 55+ menu though, which is cheaper and with smaller portions.

Cinderella

LORELAI: Let me see. Maybe we should really embrace the whole tulle thing. Go totally modern Cinderella.

Lorelai is referring to the 1950 animated Disney film Cinderella, based on the French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. Cinderella was a massive critical and commercial success for Walt Disney, and was the #3 film of 1950. It is considered one of the greatest animated films of all time.

In the film, Cinderella wears a silver-white ballgown which is made blue in promotional materials; reproductions of the dress made for children and teens tend to be made from tulle.

Neither Lorelai nor Rory ends up wearing a tulle dress to Rory’s first birthday party, so I’m not sure what happened to the dresses Emily bought them. As Lorelai tells Emily they wore them to the party, maybe she tore all the tulle off and they wore the slip dresses that were underneath? Or perhaps Lorelai is simply lying.

At the very least, the lacy green cardigan that Rory wears wasn’t made by her mother – Lorelai wore it to Friday Night Dinner in Kill Me Now, and Rory must have borrowed it.

Filofax

EMILY: You wanted me to get her a Filofax and a mermaid eraser.

A Filofax is a personal organiser in a large leather wallet with a six-ring loose-leaf binder; the name comes from the phrase “file of facts”. They were popular during the 1980s as an accessory for yuppies. Filofax is a UK company founded in 1921, and originally known as Norman & Hill.

This seems to be the “funky dayplanner” that Lorelai suggested that Emily buy Rory (or maybe to Emily, all dayplanners are Filofaxes). Either way, it actually seems like a good compromise between the mother’s and daughter’s tastes, as well as being useful to Rory who loves being organised. It seems a bit odd that Emily didn’t agree to it.

Rory’s Birth Date

When Tristan shows Rory the party invitation he received from Emily, we can see that Rory was born on October 8.

This isn’t possible according to the script – Rory started school late, and she would only have been at Chilton for a short time by October 8, less than two weeks at the absolute maximum. Several weeks have now gone by, where Rory has attended multiple Friday Night Dinners, learned to play golf, helped out at a wedding, got her first D, failed to turn up in time for a big test, attended a cat’s wake, discovered her mother and English Literature teacher made a date, and confessed to Dean that she is interested in him. Furthermore, October 8 was a Sunday, not a Friday, in 2000.

If you carefully follow Rory’s adventures since starting at Chilton, you can see that her birthday would actually be October 27. A birthday in late October is confirmed in future seasons.

If you are in a nit-picky mood, feel free to join me in tut-tutting that the party invitation said that Rory was born in the morning twice in the same sentence, but neglected to mention that it’s her sixteenth birthday – no way would Emily have done such a shoddy job.

One might also wonder how Emily was able to get the names and addresses of all Rory’s classmates to send them invitations – did Headmaster Charleston let her access the school database just for her granddaughter’s birthday party?

Jane

EMILY: This isn’t funny. I hardly get to see the girl and we only get to talk at dinner once a week and then it’s all about school and Jane.
LORELAI: Lane, Mom.

The fact that Emily mixes up Lane’s name and calls her Jane is a probable allusion to the MTV cartoon Daria (1997-2002), in which protagonist Daria Morgendorffer’s best friend is Jane Lane (I believe this to be source of Lane Kim’s rather unlikely first name).

Jane Lane is not Asian-American like Lane Kim, but her voice actress is Malaysian-born, and the character is drawn with some slight Asian characteristics, so that casual viewers sometimes assume she has Asian heritage. Besides both having black hair and being the less academic sidekick to an intellectual bestie, Jane Lane was a gifted artist, as a parallel to Lane Kim’s musical talent.

(By the way, if Emily only hears about Rory’s doings at Friday Night Dinner, whatever happened to that weekly phone call where she could catch up on Lorelai and Rory’s lives?)

“Impossible to get away”

EMILY: Regardless the funeral’s on Thursday. I thought we’d all go together.
LORELAI: Ooh, whoa. Two problems. Impossible to get away from the inn Thursday.

We learned in the Pilot that Lorelai attends business class on Thursdays, so she can certainly get away from the inn on that day. Perhaps she means that because of her class, she has to remain at the inn at other hours to make up for it, and that would clash with the funeral. How she knows it would clash when Emily hasn’t told her the time yet is a mystery. Another mystery is why she doesn’t mention her business class as another reason she is booked up on Thursdays.

Dinner with Emily

The episode opens with Lorelai and Rory having Friday Night Dinner with Emily; Richard is on a business trip to Germany. It is actually the evening of the same Friday that Rory missed the Shakespeare test in the previous episode, The Deer Hunters.

Later episodes will show Emily having a direct hotline to Chilton gossip through her friendship with Bitty Charleston, the headmaster’s wife. Yet Emily never brings up the fact that both Rory and Lorelai have thrown massive fits in the headmaster’s office that very day, and Rory was even sent home from school because of her behaviour.

Maybe her friendship with Bitty is not yet as close as it will be later, or Headmaster Charleston was unusually discreet about being yelled at by two Gilmores. For whatever reason, Lorelai seems to get away with it completely, and she has a rare escape from being chastised severely by her mother.

Secret handshake

MICHEL: There is a man with a funny accent on the phone asking for you.
LORELAI: Really? Did you guys exchange the secret handshake?

A secret handshake is any non-standard handshake used to signify fellowship within a certain group. The most famous organisation with a secret handshake is The Freemasons.

It is not clear who the man with the funny accent is: it is presumably either Mr. Medina or Headmaster Charleston, neither of whom has an especially hilarious accent. Maybe all Americans sound funny to Michel.

B-52s

Lorelai wears a B-52’s (now known as the B-52s) tee-shirt to the parent-teacher night. It’s apparently one she keeps in the car in case of accidents to clothing, and in this case she spilled coffee on herself while driving. The vision of Lorelai sitting half-naked in the car while she changes shirts is a strange one, and we might wonder where and how she managed to do this in a way that nobody noticed.

Perhaps she was able to pull over in the woods on the road to Hartford, or she’s one of those people who think nobody can see them while they’re in a car, despite the windows being made of glass, and happily pick their nose or get undressed in front of others.

The B-52s are an American new wave band formed in 1976, with an original line-up of Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, Cindy Wilson, Ricky Wilson, and Keith Strickland. They are best known for their 1978 debut single Rock Lobster, and their 1989 hit single Love Shack.

Advanced Placement

The Chilton parents are very concerned about whether the texts Mr. Medina has chosen will be covered in the Advanced Placement tests.

In the US and Canada, Advanced Placement (AP) is a program which offers college-level curricula and exmainations to high school students. American colleges and universities may grant placement and course credit to those students who get high scores in the AP exams.

Mr. Medina says that the next AP test will be held in the following month (November), but in real life AP Tests are always held in May.

We learn from this that Rory is in the AP English Literature class to improve her chances of attending university. We don’t know what other AP classes she might be doing at Chilton, but any class that she has with Paris seems like a pretty safe bet.