Title: Concert Interruptus

I’m pretty sure this is referring to coitus interruptus, the medical term for the pull-out “contraception” method, which is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

Summary: Stars Hollow is having a rummage sale, in Lorelai’s living room apparently. Sookie gets tickets to a Gilmore favorite – The Bangles. Paris, Madeline, and Louise come to Stars Hollow to work on a project and get sucked into the Gilmore web. Lorelai inexplicably offers Sookie’s tickets to the girls because she is inconsiderate. At the concert, Madeline and Louise predictable cause some trouble following some cool guy wannabes. Rory and Paris bond over their squareness. Meanwhile, Luke and Lorelai continue building their sexual tension after Luke flips out on her for taking his Ex’s hoodie from the rummage sale.

LORELAI: Here, Grinch.

SOOKIE: I have here in my hand, as requested by Ms. Lorelai Gilmore, four fabulous tickets to The Bangles at the Pastorella Theater on Saturday!

Quick sidenote… The Pastorella Theater is a fictionalized venue. The exterior scenes were shot at the Warner Bros Theatre on their backlot. The interior was filmed at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in LA.

The Bangles are an obvious Gilmore favorite for so many reasons. Badass girl band from LA, known for hits like “Manic Monday” (which Lorelai quietly signs in Season5, Episode 6) and “Walk Like an Egyptian”. They also appeared in the soundtrack of one of Lorelai’s favorite movies, Less Than Zero (Season 5, Episode 9). They were first mentioned in Season 1, Episode 5 when Lorelai compares dating Max to quitting her job, buying a guitar, and trying to become a Bangle. Ouch. It’s interesting that what she compares it to is one of her deep desires, to live a life of freedom and fun with some fame thrown in for good measure. Lorelai also references her plan to run off and join the Bangles before Rory was born and the Demerol kicked in when she gives a heartfelt pep talk to Christopher in Season 5, Episode 6. Makes you wonder what Lorelai would have been like if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. Would she really have followed her free-spirited dreams, or would she have still found a life of comfortable predictability in a small town like she truly enjoys now. Sometimes, we think we want something but our heart knows better.

PARIS: My mother is having the entire place redone, she wants all evidence of my father out of there. So unless you want to sit on no furniture while watching three Harvey Fierstein impersonators rip up the carpet and paint everything a ridiculous shade of white and call it ‘angel’s kiss’ then we’re going to have to find somebody else’s house to go to.

Harvey Fierstein is an American stage and film actor, and write. He’s probably best known for his roles in Independence Day and Mrs. Doubtfire, or for playing Edna Turnblad in the original Broadway production of Hairspray. His raspy voice is instantly recognizable, due to an abnormality of his vocal chords. Not sure why Paris chose him as a stand-in for her mother’s decorators. Seems like another homophobic comment to add to the list.

LOUISE: Tristin suddenly has very big eyes for you grandma.

In case your childhood didn’t include Western fairytales, here’s a quick explanation. In the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, our titular character goes to visit her grandma in the woods, but unfortunately her grandma has been.. kidnapped? Eaten? Either way, she isn’t there and a wolf has taken her place. A big, bad wolf to be exact. Or was that the Three Little Pigs. Anyway, Red is sketched out by this impersonator who doesn’t look like her grandma. But being a girl speaking to an authority figure, she doesn’t want to call her grandma/wolf out on her new appearance. Instead, she starts questioning her new features (“Goodness, what big eyes you have!” “The better to see you with”, responds the wolf) until the wolf just eats her whole (“What a big mouth you have” “The better to eat you with!”, responds the wolf) so she had to see that coming. If this isn’t a lesson in speaking truth to power, I don’t know what is.

The moral here seems to be that Tristan is a human-eating wolf who devours women. Not to be trusted.

LANE: All three of them huh? RORY: Double, double toil and trouble. LANE: Well, it should make for an interesting afternoon. RORY: With the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.

For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

• • The Three Witches in Macbeth

These witches will come up again when Lorelai is planning her fishing date with Alex in  Season 3, Episode 12. Macbeth is a tragedy (is there any other kind?) by Shakespeare about a Scottish general named Macbeth who gets a prophecy by the aforementioned three witches that he will one day become King of Scotland. He becomes obsessed with the prophecy and eventually kills the current King to take the throne. Yikes! He thens get swept up in committing more and more murders in order to hide his secret and quell his paranoia, which shockingly doesn’t work. Huh, weird.

The second quote is also from the play, spoken by one of the witches. This quote might sound familiar as it’s very popular in pop culture, even showing up in the GG Year in the Life “Fall” episode during my personal favorite scene of the revival.

MISS PATTY: I danced on these drums at the Copacabana in 1969.

The Copacabana was a nightclub in New York, in various locations but the final location closed in 2020 sadly. The Barry Manilow song “Copacabana” (“Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl”) is set in the famous club. It was also the setting for many a movie including Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The French Connection, The Irishman, and a musical of the same name from 1948 staring Groucho Marx. I can totally see Miss Patty as a dancer at the Copacabana.

MADELINE: There’s this great store under my therapist office who has the best vintage clothes. I found an original Pucci top for practically nothing. LOUISE: Oh Pucci is very big right now.

Emilio Pucci was an Italian designer popular for his colorful prints, often referred to as “Pucci prints”. His main heyday was in the 1960s when Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and Jackie Kennedy (Monroe was even buried in a Pucci dress!) but he had staying power into the 90s with the likes of Madonna. He dies in 1992 but his daughter kept designing under the Pucci name. The resurgence that Louise is likely referring to happened in 2000 when French luxury house LVMH bought the Pucci label.

LOUISE:  So how’s that going? Are you two still ‘Joanie loves Chachi’?

I love a good Joanie Loves Chachi reference. The show ran for just a year from 1982 to 1983 but had a long legacy before that, as a spin-off from Happy Days. Joanie (played by Erin Moran) was the sister of Richie Cunningham, Happy Days’ main character played by future Director of most movies you’ve ever seen and narrator of Arrested Development Ron Howard. Chachi (played by the one and only Scott Baio) was the Fonz’s nephew and was therefore very cool. Everyone loved Joanie and Chachi together on Happy Days so they decided to give them their own show with a somewhat unbelievable plot. Joanie and Chachi moved to Chicago to start their music career during the start of the British Invasion. The show wasn’t that popular and eventually they folded the characters back into Happy Days for it’s final season.

We’ll get another Joanie Loves Chachi reference in Season 7, Episode 1 (“wa wa wa”) but my favorite reference is actually from Friends. In the pilot, Rachel is crying over her would-not-be wedding while watching a rerun of Joanie Loves Chachi, “See! But Joanie loved Chachi! That’s the difference!” which really highlighted Jennifer Anniston’s comedic delivery.

LOUISE: So how good of a kisser is Paul Bunyan anyway?

I know Dean is taller than average at 6’4″ but he’s not some freak of mythic proportions like our man Paul here. The recurring Dean height bit isn’t that funny to me. But I digress.

Paul Bunyan is a legend, a tall tale if you will. His origins are disputed but he definitely was created in the American Midwest, Minnesota or Wisconsin. Paul is known for his larger than life height, enormous strength, and best buddy Babe the Blue Ox. He’d been the star of many kids books, tv episodes, and movies. There are even a number of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues around the US including the one at Trees of Mystery in Klamath, Oregon below.

LORELAI: Well, I think you’re actually making some friends here. RORY: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They’ve basically just moved off the plan to dump the pig’s blood on me at the prom, that’s all.

In the classic Stephen King novel and then 1976 movie, Carrie, the title character has a vat of pig’s blood dropped on her head on stage at prom, after being rigged to win Prom Queen. If that sounds brutal, the rest of the movie is not for you. It only gets worse. Carrie is bullied by her classmates at school and by her uber-religious mother at home. She’s so sheltered that when she gets her first period, she has no idea what’s happening and the other students humiliate her by throwing tampons at her. A teacher stops it and punishes the whole class, making Carrie even more of a target. Meanwhile, her worst bully begins to formulate a plan to get her onstage at prom. The bully and her boyfriend sneak onto a local farm and kill pigs to drain their blood. Oh. My. God. Carrie is starting to discover she has telekinesis abilities, okay…, and her mom calls her a witch. After Carrie sneaks out to Prom and has the blood poured on her, she freaks out and sets the gym on fire with her telekinesis, killing almost everyone there. Carrie goes home, her mother tries, to kill her but Carrie uses her powers to murder her mother but also dies in the process.

What a feel good movie!

PARIS: And before it’s dark, they’ll have every picnic basket that’s in Jelly Stone Park.

Did you watch Yogi Bear as a kid? Yogi is the famous cartoon bear, created by Hanna-Barbera and said to be based on the infamously funny baseball player Yogi Berra. Berra was known for his ridiculous one liners, similar to Yogi Bear. Berra even sued Hanna-Barbera when the cartoon first launched, though it was thrown out. Even if you’ve never seen the cartoon, you’ve probably heard his catchphrase “I’m smarter than the av-er-age bear!”.

Yogi Bear lives in Jellystone Park (could it be a nod to Yellowstone Park? Who will ever know, it’s too hard to tell.) with his best buddy Boo-Boo, and loves stealing picnic baskets from unsuspecting park visitors. Yogi first showed up in the Huckleberry Hound Show but was more popular than it’s main character so they spun him off in his own show, first airing in 1961. Their original show only lasted 2 seasons but Yogi and Boo Boo continued to appear on many TV shows including The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and Family Guy, as well as many reboots of their own show over the years. They’ve also shown up in movies, commercials, PSAs for the national forest, D.A.R.E videos, video games, and comics.

Basically, this is Yogi Bear’s world and we’re all just living in it.

SOOKIE: Did you ever see Everest? LORELAI: No. SOOKIE: It’s a good movie.

Though there have been other films about Everest since this episode aired, Sookie is referring to the 1998 documentary Everest that was once the highest grossing IMAX film of all time. It’s still the highest-grossing IMAX documentary of all time. I remember watching this in IMAX with my 5th-grade class.

Everest follows a small team of climbers as they train, prepare, and attempt to climb the most punishing mountain on earth. In a strange turn of events, the documentary was being filmed in 1996 during the same time as the infamous “1996 Mount Everest Disaster” where 8 climbers got stuck in a blizzard trying to make their descent and died. The documentary team came to the aid of the climbers in trouble, so they were able to capture footage of the accident. Author Jon Krakauer was on the ill-fated team and wrote the widely popular memoir Into Thin Air in 1997, which made the Everest documentary even more popular as it was squarely in the American collective conscious at the time.

I should also mention that Everest is not the mountain’s true name but I referred to it here as such to keep continuity with the name of the documentary. The Tibetan name for Everest is Qomolangma and the Nepali name for Everest is Sagarmāthā. The mountain was given the name Everest by British colonizers, who else?, after the Surveyor General of India at the time.

LORELAI: I mean, like was she a Catherine Zeta-Jones kind of pretty or a Michelle Pfeiffer pretty or… SOOKIE: She was an Elle MacPherson kind of pretty.

In 1999/2000 when this episode was written, these were some peak hotties.

• I just recently found out Catherine Zeta-Jones is Welsh, not some beautiful mix of Latinx/European/Goddess I assumed she was when I first saw her in The Mask of Zorro in 1998. Catherine Zeta-Jones was actually born in Swansea, Wales in 1969 to a candy factory owner dad and a seamstress mother, which sounds straight out of Charlie & Te Chocolate factory to me. She started as a stage actress but shifted into movies in the 90s, starring in modern classics like The Mask of Zorro, Traffic, Chicago, and Ocean’s Twelve. She’s been married to Gordon Gekko himself, Michael Douglas, since 1999 and despite the age difference, seem to make a great pair.

• Michelle Pfeiffer had a humble beginning too, from a middle class family in California born in 1965 who grew up to work at her local supermarket in high school. But in 1978 she won the Miss Orange County pageant and competed to become Miss California, which led her to film auditions. Her first big acting break was in Grease 2 as the new leader of the Pink Ladies, but her real breakout role was as Elvira, Tony’s cocaine addicted trophy wife in Scarface. She basically invented the heroin/cocaine chic super model craze of the early 90s in that movie. She’s done a ton of other well-known films since then including Batman Returns as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, One Fine Day, I am Sam, Hairspray, and a turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Ant-Man and The Wasp. Michelle certainly has staying power, as one of the most “bankable” actresses of the last 4 decades.

• Elle “The Body” (that’s her real supermodel nickname) Macpherson… supermodel, actress, TV host, businesswoman, and owner of one adorbz Australian accent. Elle grew up in New South Wales, and was set to attend law school at Sydney University when her life took a turn. The plan was to spend a year in the US doing lowkey modelling work to save up enough money for school, but she landed a Tab soda commercial which made her the hit “girl next door” in Australia and once the world had seen her, there was no going back. She holds the current record for most covers of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition with 5, walked the runway for some of the biggest names in fashion, and has had ad campaigns with everyone from Dior to Budweiser. But one of her mostly widely known roles was a short stint on Friends as Joey’s hot but kinda rude Australian dancer roommate/girlfriend.

RORY: It definitely was a Kodak moment.

This phrase was once so ubiquitous that I wouldn’t have needed to include it as a reference. You can even still find “Kodak Moment” spots in places like Disneyland. But we’re well past the days of physical film so this bears a little explainer. Kodak was founded in 1882 and was a major player in bringing photography and cameras to the masses. While Kodak certainly didn’t invent the camera, they did invent a new way for photos to be captured – rather than carry around heavy plates and chemicals to capture a photo, Kodak developed dry gel on paper in rolls that could be sent back to the factory to be developed and printed. Their motto was “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest”. And modern photography was born. By 1976, Kodak owned 90% of the market in the US. They even developed the first handheld digital camera in 1975. But after a number of failed strategies and missteps, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2011, selling off their patents and subsidiaries to other companies. Kodak lives on, but not in the way it once did. For a great read on the end of their signature film/ink Kodachrome, check out this wonderful article.