How many Yellow Daisies does it take to Propose?
This could have gone so wrong if Lorelai had hayfever.
Any new readers watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix for the first time should by now have gobbled up all of season one. If not, well basically this whole website is Spoiler City so - y’know there’s my due diligence right there. Hope you’re enjoying the show.
At the end of season one, Lorelai’s beau (and Rory’s teacher at Chilton) Max Medina blurts out an underbaked proposal in a ‘desperate attempt to end a bickering match’ to which Lorelai blasts him with a well-deserved dressing down:
Lorelai It should be magical! There should be music playing and romantic lighting and a subtle build up to the popping of the big question. There should be a thousand yellow daisies and candles and a horse and I don’t know what the horse is doing there unless you’re riding it, which seems a little over the top, but it should be more than… this. s01e21 Love, Daisies and Troubadors
Then later we see her - for once! - speechless, as she gets what she wished for (pictured above)… and then some!
EW talked to show writer and creator Amy Sherman-Palladino together with Sandy Veneziano the Production Designer, for a peek behind-the-scenes. Well, behind that scene in particular:
Amy Sherman-Palladino We had no money on Gilmore, especially that first year. We were trying to trade sexual favors for snow. Sandy Veneziano We cheated a little bit on some of the shots. We would push the background daisies - if it wasn’t a wide shot - further in and put some on apple boxes so they were a little higher and filled the space.
So, how many daisies did the show actually end up using?
Amy Oh my God, it’s thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. I think we all lost count at some point… Three or four times we had to send people back to get yellow daisies. I think we wiped out yellow daisies on the West Coast.
Click right here to catch up on the whole piece.
What I want to know is – where are the candles and the horse? (And the roller-skates for the horse?)
The Daisies scene is sandwiched between Rory blurting out to Dean, ‘I love you, you idiot!’ and Lorelai and Rory running at each other through Stars Hollow gibbering like the lovestruck fools they are. Was this the most ‘up’ ending of any of the seasons?
Did you like the daisy proposal? I thought Max’s original proposal-to-end-an-argument was frighteningly realistic. I’ve heard worse.
And do you think Max was right for Lorelai?