Recap / Gilmore Girls S 04 E 07

The Festival of Living Art

Rory comes home to do laundry. Jackson's brother Bo is visiting. Sookie tells Lorelai that she's planning on a home birth. Stars Hollow hosts the festival of living pictures this year. Rory plays Antea, Kirk plays Christ in The Last Supper, Lorelai is the Renoir girl again, and Andrew is the statue The Reaper. Gil auditions for Hep Alien and is played by Sebastian Bach. Sookie goes into labor in the middle of the display of Dance at Bougival, the painting Lorelai is in.

Tropes

• Ask a Stupid Question...: When Nicole suggests to postpone their divorce, Luke asks if they can do that, but as a divorce lawyer Nicole knows her stuff.
• Ability over Appearance: At least over age, as in-universe, the ability to hold still while pretending to be a painting takes priority over looking exactly like the person in the original painting.
• Ambiguously Jewish: Miss Patty swears by saying "oy to the vey".
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Kirk calls the guy playing Judas a blasphemer, a traitor, and unattractive.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Lorelai claims she won't clip the coupons. Rory claims she doesn't see the problem with taking them away in that case.
  • Lorelai tries to convince Bruce she doesn't hate births or midwives, but Bruce isn't buying it.
• Captain Obvious: Andrew informs Sookie that she hasn't given birth yet, while staring at her huge ninth-month belly.
• Child Hater: The guy who sits next to Rory in make-up before the living art performance claims to be this.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Hep Alien needs it spelled out to them that the grown man in the garage is the guitarist they've been talking to.
    Gil: I'm here for the audition.
    Lane: (confused) What audition?
  • Kirk eats lentils with his hands to get into character as Jesus. Lorelai asks if it's because they didn't have utensils back then. Kirk replies that yes, they did have utensils back then and keeps eating with his hands.
  • Sookie thinks her baby is too stupid to know it's not an elephant.
    Sookie: It doesn't know its butt from a hole in the ground!
• Dissimile: Kirk compares Taylor's willingness to fold due simply to hardship to following blind guides who strain at a gnat yet swallow a camel.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Babette calls dibs on the "new hunk" Gil.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • Bruce the midwife. She is strict enough to make One Drink Will Kill the Baby look downplayed.
    Bruce: We are all here to serve the baby!
  • Buff Otis. Lorelai thinks Rory is her type.
• Gory Discretion Shot: We don't get to see the performance of Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
• Holier Than Thou: Kirk's attitude after he is cast as Christ. Judas gets fed up with it.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Lane's band accepts a member (who is speculated to be twice their age) based on how likeable they find him.
• Irony: Nicole finds it ironic that getting married is what broke Luke and her up.
• Method Acting: Inverted in-universe. Being dressed as Christ makes Kirk into an impromptu inspirational speaker. The role plays him. Although he is markedly less friendly to Judas than Jesus was.
• No, Except Yes: Luke swears he won't help fix the table for The Last Supper no matter how much they nag him to, but he later admits to Nicole that he did.
• Not So Stoic: Sookie acts cool about the being nine months pregnant until she looks up how long an elephant is pregnant and becomes afraid she'll never give birth but just be pregnant forever.
• Older Than They Look: Gil. Not to a shocking degree, unless you're a teenager, then he's ancient. Brian starts listing things Gil must have been alive for, like the moon landing and the bicentennial.
  Brian: He was our age when we were born!
• Pillow Pregnancy: Lorelai thinks it's as likely as not that Bruce took the baby and stuffed a pillow under Sookie's shirt to cover it up.
• Pregnancy Makes You Crazy: Sookie freaks out about the duration of the pregnancy. She thinks she may have caught some elephant-gestation-ness from an elephant at the zoo. Lorelai tells her hopscotching around town won't help the baby out.
• Product Placement: Played with. The way they talk abour Dreamfresh laundry powder sounds like a commercial, but it doesn't seem to exist. There is a make-up product of the same name, though.
• Shout-Out:
  • Sookie's baby pager plays Scott Joplin.
  • Lorelai finds Lane's idea for a spin cover to be very Norman Rockwell.
  • Andrew is excited about getting to be painted all white for his role as The Reaper.
  • Lorelai quotes Hey Batter Batter by Trent Tomlinson
  • Gil says Hep Alien is gonna be as big as Pink Floyd.
  • Sookie and Lorelai refer to Bo as Oscar Wilde.
  • Lane suggests dressing Gil as Angus Young in AC/DC.
  • Sookie freaks out about exploding like one of those things on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life that explode and cover everything in slime.
  • When Lorelai says she has a box of stuff from 1984, Sookie asks if she means the book.
  • Lorelai's pregnancy box contains debate about whether Andrew McCarthy was hotter than Emilio Estevez, as well as articles on R.E.M. and a Bananarama jumper. It also contains a walkman with a cassette with 99 Luftballons, some R.E.M., and some Thompson Twins still in it.
  • The festival includes art by Leonardo da Vinci, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Parmigianio, and Gustave Bohman.
  • Kirk reads The Bible in preparation for his role.
  • Gil's old band was supposed to tour with Quiet Riot.
  • Christ and the Apostles watched The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded without Judas.
  • Pablo Picasso's Guernica is too gory to show on-screen.
  • Rory calls Lorelai "Miss Desmond".
  • Lorelai claims Stevie Wonder could have seen her flinch seven years ago.
  • Rory advices Lorelai to "close her eyes and think of England", quoting Queen Victoria's alleged advice to one of her daughters regarding sex with a disagreeable husband.
• Take That!:
  • Hep Alien doesn't sound that good before Gil joins.
    Rory: Do you hear that? No music.
    Lorelai: And the band stopped playing too.
  • Taylor gloats about how the whimps in Woodbury can't handle a little flooding, thus forfeiting the festival of living art.
• When I Was Your Age...: Two boys are rude to Rory, and Rory comments that when she was young they respected their elders.

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