Then we did the things…the dreaming and the planning and the inviting and the shopping and the furniture rearranging.
Which required drinking more of the coffee.
Why…thank you, Rory.
We found some cute party supplies on Etsy – coffee cups, team boyfriend stickers, and Gilmore Girls Bingo boards. Favor boxes, too.
And we recruited biggest brother to help tape together those favor boxes just an hour or so before he headed to Boston to catch an early morning flight. He’s a keeper for sure, and his Gilmore loving girlfriends (i.e. girls who are also friends) back at Baylor were impressed, I think.
Especially after we sent one of them this photo…
Kayla made the famous and always obeyed sign from Luke’s diner.
We decked the halls with Gilmore Garland…
…and quotes…
…and more garland.
It was a Favorite Junk Food Of Rory And Lorelai Potluck, and just take a look at the feast which our guests put together…
Not pictured is my freezer – full to the brim with Ben & Jerry’s pints – six or seven different flavors. There were two half gallons of Friendly’s Ice Cream, too, because this is Massachusetts after all.
We gathered at 5pm, loaded up our plates with a beautiful assortment of sugar and carbs and Chinese take-out…
…and got all snuggled in for the first of four 90 minute episodes – all 19 of us!
First: Winter
Then: Spring, Summer, and Fall.
And Fall just about Did. Us. In. (see our reaction below) And though it was 1:30am, and there was cleaning to do, and furniture to move, and air mattresses to inflate, I was able to do a little processing of What. Just. Happened. with Lois – my die hard, late night helper. (The younger girls were all processing upstairs in Kayla’s room.)
Yep…that is exactly what we all looked like when the screen went black.
(Well, all except for Mary, who was just plain angry, and then had to leave so that she could go to another Gilmore Girls Movie Marathon the next day with friends from church. She was not too happy about keeping that shocking ending to herself through All. Four. Seasons. with her unsuspecting viewing partners.)
But then I slept on it. I got up the next morning and went for a run before my Sleeping Gilmore Beauties woke up, and decided sometime between the black screen and the breakfast frittata that it made sense. I mean in an Amy Sherman-Palladino, literary, “full circle” kind of way, it made sense.
Funny how we all expected things to be “full circle” in a perfectly, romantic, fairy tale sense. Not one of us expected what happened, but if I could go back in time, I would have stopped the movie just before the Final. Four. Words. and engaged my living room viewers in a Socratic Circle discussion about what was probably going to happen. (They are each classically trained, after all, and I’m certain Gilmore Girls would have been a priority in ancient Greece.) Questions and answers until we came to a sensible conclusion. There were less than 2 minutes on the counter, for goodness’ sake! What could possibly happen in those two minutes to wrap up a seven season era? I’m convinced that, had we given it enough time and thought, we could have come up with those Final. Four. Words.
There was foreshadowing. There were clues. There was a Rory who was not doing ANYTHING we wanted her to do and all the things we didn’t want her to do. It made sense. Maddening sense, but still.
I got a few text messages the next day about the ending, and so I just started copying and pasting my response:
So, here are a few things I hoped for and didn’t get:
- More of my favorite characters. I wanted more scenes with Lane and her mom, (though her dad finally made an appearance – ha!), with Sookie and Jackson, with Miss Patty, and with each of the previous boyfriends. Paris and Kirk were hilarious, though. I loved seeing their fixed, yet aged temperaments and tendencies. So funny.
- Flashbacks and more references to past episodes. I was hoping for more picking up where things left off and for more references to previous situations. I wish ten years hadn’t expired, even though in reality they had. In many ways not enough stayed the same, and not enough changed. There needed to be more of both.
And here are a few things that were highly disappointing, or maybe just one thing. One person, really:
- Rory. Though I still love her (and yes, I know she’s not real), she was just plain disappointing. Depressing. Frustrating. Infuriating? Ten years gone by with nothing to show for it. Entitled. Immoral. Uncaring. Reckless. The list goes on.
She was not the Rory who drew us into the show in the first place. The sweet, moral, wise-beyond-her-years, and disciplined young school girl. The kind-hearted, yet determined book worm. The faithful daughter and granddaughter we grew to love in the first few seasons.
That’s me and my disheartened look regarding Rory’s character.
The language was disappointing as well. Maybe I’m not remembering correctly, but the revival seemed to have much more cursing than the originals. But Emily also wore jeans, so clearly everyone was spiraling down.
So, I was disheartened, and I had a living room full of teenaged girls and even some of their moms watching all of this play out. I was really hoping for more, and the risk I took in having a party around movies I had not seen proved to be just that: risky. I probably should have known better.
We did have fun, though, eating our junk food and laughing at Kirk’s new Uber Ooo-ber business and remembering the fun and silly aspects of the show we’ve all enjoyed over the last year or so.
Now that it’s over, it’s time for more coffee.
P.S. I still have the templates for the favor boxes and the Bingo boards. If you are throwing your own party in the near future and want to use them, send me a message, and I’ll send you those supplies. I’ll happily throw in the “Gilmore Garland” as well.
But maybe you might want to stick with the Anne of Green Gables remake?
🙂