Gilmore Handbook Rule 36

If you don't know the answer, or can't answer the question with the truth, fake it. Just try your hardest to make it sound good.

Lorelai was greeted at Stars Hollow High Career Day with a big round of applause. She was suddenly no longer nervous. "No, no, save it for when I wow you with my brilliance. I'm really happy to be here with you all today. I recognize a lot of you from over the years and you're all getting taller and older – stop it. Anyhow, as some of you know, I run the Independence Inn. Sounds simple, running an inn. Well, the sentence is simple, the job is not. Like most jobs, mine involves many other people, people it is my job to hire, to train, and to inspire because when you have good employees it makes you look good. Oh, questions already – are questions okay?"

"They're encouraged," Debbie replied from her seat.

Lorelai called on the girl who raised her hand. "Yes?"

"You're Rory Gilmore's mom, aren't you?"

Lorelai smiled. "Yes I am, and proud of it."

"Oh," the girl replied.

"Oh, is that it? Well, I hope all your questions are that easy. Okay, now, why is it necessary to inspire employees? Why can't you just train 'em and let 'em do their jobs? Well…" a second girl raised her hand. "…yes?"

"Didn't you get pregnant when you were sixteen?" the girl asked.

"Um, sixteen… it was around that age. Sixteen, that sounds right. Okay. Different people working for you will have different needs… yeah?"

"Well, what about school?" one boy asked.

Lorelai was confused by his question, and hoped he meant schooling required for her job, the reason she was there! "School? I'm sorry."

"Did you drop out when you got pregnant with Rory?" he clarified.

"No, technically, I didn't drop out. I, uh, I kept going as long as I could while I got pregnant, which I would recommend to any girl. Not the getting pregnant part, obviously. Um, although, uh, if that happens, um, you know… it shouldn't. I mean, it could but you should try to avoid it… um, anyway, uh, I got my GED, yeah," Lorelai rambled.

"Lorelai, why don't we move this along?" Debbie pressed.

Lorelai cleared her throat. "Yes, oh, moving it along, moving it along. Okay, okay, okay. Boy, I should've been more organized here."

"Well, are you sorry you got pregnant?" the girl who started it all asked.

Lorelai shook her head. "No, it brought me Rory, but timing is everything. I mean, I could've… sixteen, you guys are sixteen, right… and hey, is that clock right?"

A third girl had a question. "What do you mean by timing?"

The first girl wasn't done torturing Lorelai. "Yeah, if you had waited and had a baby with another man at a different time…"

A fourth girl inserted herself into the conversation. "It wouldn't have been Rory, right?"

"Hey, you know what's fun to talk about? Late checkout," Lorelai said, trying to make it sound remotely interesting.

The second girl seemed to want to continue the conversation. "But it was good you got pregnant when you did because you got Rory," she insisted.

"Look, you guys, this is a very important subject, and I promise that another time I would love to take you all for a cup of coffee and, and talk about…" she paused as she caught sight of Debbie glaring at her. "…if you should even be allowed to drink coffee because coffee is for older…" she sighed. "Butch Danes, everybody."

"That was humiliating," Luke recalled.

Lorelai gasped. "Uh, for who?"

Luke shrugged. "Both of us, I guess," he consented.

"I tried to make up good answers," Lorelai started, "But they just attacked me. I was like, whoa, who are you, Rosie O'Donnell gettting on Elisabeth Hasselbeck?"

"I think you answered as best as you possibly could, they were the ones that started it all themselves, you weren't the one who decided to give them a lesson," Luke replied.

"Thanks, Luke, that makes me feel a little better," she said. "I just didn't want to get a bad reputation, or Rory to get a bad reputation, you know?"

Luke nodded. "I understand."

"I've had to make up answers far more difficult than those," Lorelai recalled.

"Mom?"

Lorelai looked up from her magazine. "Yeah, sweets?"

"What's a color?"

Lorelai scrunched up her nose at the difficulty of the question. "Strike one."

"Huh?" Rory asked.

Sighing, Lorelai put the magazine down. "Well, it's hard to explain," she said, trying to force herself to remember the lesson on pigments, color and light she'd tried to learn in high school.

"Okay," Rory said, seeming not to care.

Lorelai sighed. "The best way I can explain it to you is that a color is the thing that comes out of a crayon. So, inside the crayon, there's a bunch of little color bubbles, that have… paint in them. And the bubbles pop when you want to color."

Rory's eyes widened. "Wow," she said, nearly breathless.

"And they have crayons so you can match them with stuff outside, and that's how you learn what's supposed to be what color," Lorelai said, stunned her intelligent young daughter was believing this.

"I like that answer. It's a good answer," Rory said, returning to her coloring book.

Luke shook his head. "How you come up with this stuff, I will never understand."

"I'm good at pressure, most of the time. When it's a vicious pack of sixteen year olds, it's a no brainer, I lose," Lorelai replied.

Rory took a sip of coffee, listening to Luke and Lorelai talk. "I bet that's how you gave most of your greatest excuses to Grandma," she mused.

Lorelai nodded. "Yeah, I had a few good ones, but then they started getting crazier and crazier, leading to my groundings."

Rory shook her head, smiling. "Gotta make them believable, Mom," Rory chided.

"You've been awfully quiet for the past few rules," Lorelai said to Rory.

Rory shrugged. "I just like watching you two interact with each other. It's really sweet," she reasoned.

Lorelai smiled. "You like watching Luke say 'ah, jeez,' to everything I have to say?"

"Yes, I do. It's nice to see you have someone in your life that makes you this happy. I mean, you're really, really happy," Rory insisted.

"I really am. Do you ever make up answers to stuff?" Lorelai asked Luke.

"Not unless it's to Kirk. And that's very rare that I get away with it because he says he knows otherwise."

"Why'd he ask you, then?" Rory chimed in.

"My point exactly," Luke replied. "He doesn't get it."

Lorelai turned the page and cleared her throat, signaling that she was ready to begin explaining the next rule, and Rory slipped out of the living room and back into her bedroom.