Rory Gilmore Dies at Obama Inauguration Ball

(Here is another installment from my series TV Character Obituaries)

WASHINGTON, DC – The youngest of the self-styled “Gilmore Girls,” Rory, had come a long way from the days when she and her mother, Lorelai, the other half of the self-styled “Gilmore Girls,” lived in a mud hut behind the Independence Inn in Stars Hollow, a town that went so far out of its way to be quirky that the town drunk was a lifelong teetotaler. They were “girls” because one of them, Rory, was an actual girl, and the other one, Lorelai, was a woman whose claim to quirkiness was to act younger than her daughter, all the while believing that she was the first American female ever to turn this forever-a-teenager shtick into a personal identity. The Gilmore Girls put the “talk” in “girl-talk,” as, to this day, they are the only conversational pair ever to have recited the complete Shakespeare plays during half-time of a Yale-Harvard football game, with Rory doing the male parts and Lorelai speaking the female parts because she was still, like, such a girl.

Rory managed to finance her way though Yale University by turning her machine gun of a mouth on her grandparents, her father and one of the quirky characters of Stars Hollow who was deaf and ran his own karaoke business. In the end, each target emerged from their respective trenches waving the white flag in one hand and a blank check in the other. It was a no-brainer that she would major in journalism, since to write words meant using her words and Rory loved nothing more than her own words.

Rory’s first job out of college was writing for an internet news source, which meant she was paid in the currency of up-beat e-mails from the editor. Her assignment was to follow the Barack Obama campaign for president – a natural progression for a liberal white girl from Connecticut who read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as ammunition to call Lorelai a fascist, which, of course, led to an exchange that had the same word count as the entire transcript of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

In time, Rory became intimate with the Obamas, especially with Michelle, who was a woman who acted her age – that is, not sixteen — which intrigued the young journalist, whose own mother still used song lyrics from The Bangles to inform her most important life decisions.  Meanwhile, Lorelai went on record – a double record set – that she was happy that her daughter was meeting people who possessed not a single quirky bone in their body – if, she added, while rolling her eyes, “that’s the kind of thing you go for now that you’ve become Little Miss Establishment.” Then Obama won the election, and all Rory could talk about was Barack this and Michelle that to the point that she filibustered her mother, a first in their long, chatty relationship.

Rory Gilmore was allowed to bring fellow girl, Lorelai, to the Inauguration Ball. Lorelai watched Michelle dig to Stevie Wonder, and knew that this “woman” could also match her in what she had always considered her domain, pop culture. This realization made Lorelai so insecure that she pulled Rory aside for some “girl talk” that soon escalated into the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. So-called mother and daughter jabbered at one another for two whole hours, while Al Gore took notes with the purpose of quickening his own slow delivery, albeit too late for those who could have watched An Inconvenient Truth in a less cumbersome ten minutes. Then, in the middle of a sentence that included four independent clauses, Rory dropped dead from verbal exhaustion.

Lorelai knelt down with tears in her eyes and began talking to the corpse, saying, “Now, Rory, I’m going to tell you something, and you’d better not interrupt me…”

(Check out my website http://www.authorjamesfjohnson.com)

 

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