Asher holds a book signing for his new novel and Paris is annoyed about all the other girls who hover around him and try to flirt. Doyle shows up at the reading and mentions to Rory that Asher dates a new freshman every year. Rory wrote a paper for Asher’s class, but she doesn’t feel like it was very good. When she gets an A, she tells Asher she wants to earn her grades and not get good grades because of her friendship with Paris. Asher is offended and tells her that her paper was great and she shouldn’t question his grading tactics.

Lane sees some other Korean girl walk out of her old house with Mrs. Kim. She’s a little jealous that Mrs. Kim has a new daughter. Lane attacks the girl on the sidewalk one day and finds out she’s a foreign exchange student.

Jason goes to the country club to work on his golf game and none of the other businessmen will talk to him. He can’t get a hold of his father or Richard. He finally gets a call from Richard’s lawyer, who informs him that Richard has gone back to Floyd’s company and taken all the clients. Now Jason has no clients and no prospects and is totally ruined. Lorelai goes to Richard to yell at him for treating Jason so badly. Richard tells her there was nothing else he could do and he’s a little upset that Lorelai doesn’t care what happens to him or Emily, only what happens to Jason. Emily overhears, and she tells Richard she’s worried that if he goes after Jason like this, Lorelai will stop talking to them. Richard is unsympathetic.

Lorelai tells Rory she doesn’t plan to go to Friday night dinner because of all the mess going on, but Rory is selfish and says it’s really important to her because sometimes it’s the only time she gets to see her mom. When they get to the house early, Richard answers the door himself and is surprisingly friendly and a little scatterbrained. Emily comes in the front door and won’t tell the Girls where she was. Lorelai and Rory hide in the bushes after dinner and see Emily get in her car and drive away. Lorelai calls hotels in town until she finds the one where Emily is staying. She tells Jason all about it, and then Jason says he’s suing Richard because it’s the only thing he can do. Lorelai breaks up with him because she can’t be with someone who is suing her family.

Lane’s band has a gig and it goes great. Lane tells Zack she wants to celebrate, but he goes to the bar to flirt with some groupies (one of whom is named Shannon – ew). Lane feels sad and lonely, so she goes to her old house late that night and kisses Mrs. Kim on the forehead while she’s sleeping.

Lorelai, to the maid: I’m looking for my father. Big guy, bowtie.

Also in this episode: Luke signs his divorce papers and mails them off.

Janet is going to Florida for spring break. She invites Paris and Rory, but they’re going to stay on campus and stage a protest, something about Burmese prisoners. They set up their table in the courtyard, but it’s freezing and nobody is signing their petition anyway because everyone is on spring break. When it starts raining, Paris and Rory run inside and get under their covers. They decide to go to Florida after all.

Luke is crabby. He tells Lorelai it’s because he’s not wearing his own socks. He spent the night at Nicole’s, and when he got up in the morning and got some socks out of the drawer, he realized the socks were someone else’s. He calls Lorelai one night and asks her to come pick him up because he’s in jail. He waited outside his and Nicole’s place until she rolled up in some guy’s car. After she and the guy went inside, Luke kicked the guy’s car over and over again until a cop showed up and hauled him away.

Jason gives Lorelai a key to his apartment and she makes sure the conversation is as awkward as possible because I guess she doesn’t understand the significance of the key. He later tells her that they’re at a point in their relationship where he usually breaks it off, but he doesn’t want to break up with her and in fact he wants to see more of her.

Paris throws a lot of money around in Florida and manages to get a tent on the beach with chairs and refreshments. Madeline and Louise (who, let’s face it, always belonged in Florida on a perpetual spring break) show up. They’ve been on spring break for a month and they’ve realized they can get all kinds of free stuff from guys if they make out with each other. They take Paris and Rory to a club, and Paris wants to know why everyone else is having more fun than they are. Paris wants to have a real spring break, so she kisses Rory and then asks how good a kisser she is.

The girls get drunk together later, and Madeline goes through Rory’s phone and calls Dean. So Rory leaves him a drunken message and then hangs up. Later that night, Paris and Rory sit on the beach and realize they’ve had about as much fun as they can stand. They decide to use some of Paris’ frequent flyer miles to go home early.

Some girl: Is it raining?

Paris: No, it’s National Baptism Day. Tie your tubes, idiot.

Emily is crabby when she tells the Girls about the Atlantic City trip. Jason gets Richard set up with a wireless internet network, and Richard walks around the house with his laptop, totally amazed that he’s on the internet everywhere he goes. Jason is still trying to get Lorelai to go to dinner with him.

Rory is trying for a spot with the Yale Daily News. A review she writes of a chamber music recital doesn’t get printed and she freaks out. Doyle, the editor, tells her it’s because she’s trying too hard to be nice and what she really thinks is coming through. So she goes to a ballet recital and writes a scathing review. It gets published, but the ballerina hates her and writes “DIE JERK” on Rory’s suite’s door. She screams at Rory in front of everyone in the dining hall. Lorelai thinks it was too harsh, but Emily and Richard love it.

Lorelai and Michel go to Sookie’s to have a meeting about the Dragonfly, but Michel isn’t allowed to come inside because he sneezed five days ago and Sookie is afraid he’ll get Davie sick. Bruce the midwife is still there and she yells at Lorelai for babytalking Davie.

Mrs. Kim gives Lane a jug to send to Dave. Lane gets panicky because her mother once told her that jug is the “marriage jug” that she’s going to give to Lane’s husband one day. She tells her she can’t send it, and Mrs. Kim tells her it’s just a jug and she lied to Lane about it when she was a kid so she would stop crying or something.

Lorelai goes to the diner and acts all awkward and weird when she sees Nicole there. Why the hell can’t the Gilmore Girls just act like regular people? Why are they so awkward? Lorelai pretty much runs away from the diner, but goes back later and asks Luke what’s going on. She says she thinks it’s weird that he and Nicole are dating. They have a fight and Lorelai storms off in a huff.

Janet, to Rory: Made anyone mad lately?

Paris: Oh, please. That would be like Dorothy pissing off the Tin Man.

Richard: Emily, I’m going to Google you.

Emily: You most certainly are not going to Google me!

Lane’s band is looking for a new guitarist and it’s not going well because everyone who shows up sucks. A guy named Gil comes to audition and he’s totally awesome, but Zack and Brian aren’t sure about him because he’s old. Lane goes to tell him he’s not in the band, but he seems so disappointed that she tells him he’s in.

Sookie and Jackson have decided to have the baby at home and they give Lorelai a baby pager so she can be there for the birth. Jackson’s brother Beau is in town for the baby’s arrival, but the baby is late and Beau gets annoyed that he has to keep changing his flight home. Sookie and Jackson have hired a midwife who is really scary and intimidating. She doesn’t like Lorelai because she thinks she’s anti-midwife.

The Festival of Living Pictures is coming to Stars Hollow and everyone is excited. Kirk is so happy to be assigned as Christ, but he takes it a little too seriously and acts like the troubadour is his mortal enemy because he’s going to be Judas. Lorelai is upset when she’s not the Renoir girl, but Taylor says it’s because she flinched last time. He wants Rory to be in one of the paintings, and she says she’ll only do it if Lorelai can be Renoir girl.

Half of the table for the Last Supper is missing and Taylor gets discouraged and wants to cancel the festival. Kirk, dressed as Jesus to help get him into character, starts preaching and convinces everyone to go ahead with the festival.

Sookie comes over to Lorelai’s at one in the morning. She’s totally freaking out because the baby is so late. Lorelai calms her down by showing her a box full of stuff from the night Rory was born.

Lorelai manages not to flinch during the festival, but her baby pager goes off while she’s on stage. She keeps it together until the curtain closes, and then she runs off to Sookie’s.

Nicole comes to the diner and tells Luke she wants to postpone the divorce and date for a while.

Miss Patty: Have a cigarette.

Taylor: I don’t smoke.

Miss Patty: Could you start?

Other notes: The Festival of Living Pictures is based on The Pageant of the Masters. Here are some pictures of the Gilmore Girls’ version of it. It seems like a really cool thing to see:

Lorelai borrows Luke’s truck to take Rory’s stuff to Yale, but she doesn’t know how to drive a stick. She ends up backing up all the way to the diner to tell him his truck is broken because she can’t get it out of reverse. He draws her a diagram for the gearshift instead of taking away the keys like any sane person would do.

Rory takes notes during her tour of the campus and a couple of snotty bitches make fun of her. One of her suitemates, Tana, is super awkward and weird. She doesn’t know how to make small talk, so the first thing she says to Rory is that she’s adopted. Lorelai goes to leave, but then she sees some of the stuff other kids are bringing into their dorm rooms. She decides Rory needs more cool dorm things so she goes shopping.

Paris shows up at the dorm. She’s decided to go to Yale. Terrence, her life coach, felt that Rory and Paris still had a ways to go on their life journey together, so Paris had her father arrange for them to be roommates. Paris now has a craft table and she can’t stand Tana.

Luke gets his divorce papers and Nicole’s lawyers don’t believe he doesn’t want anything from her. After arguing with them for a while, he gets Lorelai to tell them he doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t help. Luke and Lorelai go back to Yale with more stuff, and there’s a whole bit with the Yale mattress that is kind of exhausting. They get Rory all set up and then leave. They get all the way back to Stars Hollow, and then Lorelai gets a text from Rory that says, “Come back.” So Lorelai takes the truck again so she doesn’t have to go home for the Jeep. She hangs out in the dorm all night, orders a ton of food to find out which places are the best and invites all the other girls from the dorm to hang out in Rory’s suite. Everyone has a blast and the snotty bitches who made fun of Rory earlier tell her they’re having a great time.

Lorelai spends the night at the dorm, and finally goes home the next morning to her sad and empty house. Meanwhile, the snotty bitches come by the suite to tell Rory they “Lorelaied” some places and found some really good coffee.

I’m not even going to tell you how sickened I am about Lorelai spending the night at the dorm.

Paris: My glue gun leaked on my macaroni!

The girls are back from their European trip. Rory has a week before school starts, and she and Lorelai have every minute planned. The first day back is for handing out presents from Europe, so they put all the gifts in their backpacks and hit the streets. They pass Luke yelling at Taylor for putting in a window between his soda shoppe and the diner, and it reminds them they didn’t get him anything. Lorelai gets some jam from Jackson and makes a label to go on the jar so it looks like it came from France or something. Luke knows it’s fake, but he’s a good sport about it.

Sookie is getting very pregnant, but Jackson doesn’t want to know the sex of the baby. He’s even had buttons made so that nobody tells him. Rory takes a button, but Lorelai wants to know. Sookie takes her outside to the shed, where she’s keeping all the baby stuff. Everything is blue.

Walking down the street, Rory passes Kirk putting up posters with her picture on them. Apparently, Taylor has proclaimed her the “ice cream queen” as part of his campaign to get people excited about the imminent opening of his soda shoppe. He’s deeply offended when she says she can’t do it and tries to guilt her.

Rory opens the mail and freaks out when she realizes she wrote down the wrong date for Yale. She’s starting school in two days. She has a ton of things to do to get ready, so Lorelai, who is super happy she’s not required at Friday night dinner, offers to take care of it while Rory is at the grandparents’ house. Emily is annoyed that Lorelai isn’t there, so she manipulates Rory into staying all night to watch hours of videos of ballroom dancing competitions. Rory calls Lorelai and asks her to come rescue her. Lorelai and Emily start arguing, but then Lorelai’s jet lag catches up to her and she starts laughing uncontrollably. She ends up sticking around, and Emily falls asleep in her chair.

Luke is being weird about his cruise with Nicole and won’t talk about it at all. He finally tells Lorelai he and Nicole got swept up in the romance of it all and got married, but now they’re getting a divorce.

Luke, about his marriage: We tried to ignore it for a while, you know, went snorkeling.

Rory tells Richard and Emily that she’s going to Yale. They don’t react at first, but after Lorelai assures them that she’s totally fine with it, they jump up from the dinner table to call all their friends. Jess tells Rory that Yale is only 22.8 miles from Stars Hollow, and she’s really touched that he took the time to look it up.

Tobin the night manager comes to a meeting at the inn to talk about what they’re going to do with the place. Michel hates him. Tobin gives Lorelai a present because he knows her birthday is coming up. It’s just a candle, but Lorelai loves it. A few days later, Michel comes to the inn with his own present for Lorelai. Michel is feeling pretty good about himself until Tobin gives Lorelai her real present, some dead guy’s jacket (Joe Strummer from The Clash).

Luke watches Jess go to school one morning. As soon as he gets near the door, he cuts around the side of the school, gets in his car and drives away. Luke tries to talk to Jess that night, but Jess insists he has everything under control. Luke has lunch with Nicole and her parents the next day, and he loses it when they ask him if he might ever want children. The next morning, Jess leaves to go to school and freaks out because his car is gone. Luke tells him to just go to school and he’ll take care of finding the car. When Jess is gone, Luke smiles smugly.

Paris calls Rory and asks if there’s any more homework for her to do. She wants to keep her mind off things, but Rory says she’s done all the work she’s missed. Rory tells her to go out and do something, and Paris shows up at school the next day with her nose bandaged. She got it pierced after getting off the phone with Rory, and she was apparently allergic to the metal and her nose swelled up and she had to go to the emergency room.

Richard’s secretary calls Lorelai to arrange a lunch. At lunch, Richard tells Lorelai that on the day she was born, he went out and made a real estate investment in her name. That property has been sold and all the investors get a check. Richard gives Lorelai a check for $75,000. At Friday night dinner, Lorelai gives the money to Emily to repay her and Richard for Chilton. Emily is angry because she thinks it means Lorelai and Rory won’t be coming over anymore. Lorelai mentions that Richard gave her the money, and he gets upset because he didn’t want Emily to know about it. Everyone starts yelling at each other and the Girls leave. When they get back to Stars Hollow, Rory kind of yells at Lorelai for giving Emily the money that way. Lorelai is pissed. She borrowed money and she paid it back. Rory understands and apologizes. The Girls go to Lorelai’s birthday party.

Emily: I saw an open can of cream of mushroom soup. Nothing good can come of that.

Also in this episode: For Lorelai’s birthday, Rory gets the pizza parlor to make a huge pizza.

Other notes: I hate Bruce McCulloch (Tobin).

Lorelai and Rory clean out their garage for Lane and the band. It’s a horrible mess, but they get the job done. The band comes over and Zack develops a crush on Lorelai. Dave acts like kind of a jerk to Lane and Rory gets upset, but Lane assures her it’s all an act. They don’t want Zack or Brian to suspect there’s anything going on between them.

Alex invites Lorelai to go fishing with him because she told a little white lie and acted like she enjoys the outdoors. She and Rory get a bunch of fishing books out of the library. Luke sees them and offers to teach Lorelai himself. He sets up a kiddie pool in her front yard and throws some fish in it. He asks Lorelai why she’s learning to fish and she admits it’s for a guy.

Paris tries to have Rory impeached from the student government and is mad when the faculty adviser says that’s not allowed. They have a big fight during a student council meeting. Later, Headmaster Charleston calls them to his office and admonishes them for acting so immaturely. Afterward, Rory tries to make up, but Paris isn’t having it and she stalks off to be angry some more.

Taylor is beginning construction on his soda shoppe and he has a lawyer bring the lease agreement to Luke. The lawyer is a pretty lady named Nicole, and Luke kind of likes her. Jess tells Luke she was flirting with him and tells him to ask her out. After he finds out Lorelai is learning to fish for some guy, Luke does ask Nicole out. She accepts.

Lane’s cousin is getting married and Rory helps her get the bride ready. Rory always helps at Kim family weddings and it’s kind of a bonding thing for Rory and Lane. But this is apparently the last of the Kim relatives to get married aside from Lane herself, so the girls are kind of melancholy that this is the last time they’ll be able to do this. Dave Rygalski plays guitar at the ceremony, and Lane thinks today is the day to tell Mrs. Kim she wants to go to prom. Mrs. Kim says she can go to prom, but she can’t go with Dave. He’s not Korean.

Rory: I fell off my chair.

Mrs. Kim: Oh. Well, don’t.