Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between)

by Lauren Graham

I felt trapped. And I felt dumb. I obviously hadn’t used my lucky penny at the right time, and now I had no edge, nothing that separated me from any other struggling sap in the city.

I still find that, in general, having a plan is, well, a good plan. But when my carefully laid plan laughed at me, rather than clutch at it too tightly I just made a new one, even if it was one that didn’t immediately make sense. In blindly trying a different path, I accidentally found one that worked better. So don’t let your plan have the last laugh, but laugh last when your plan laughs, and when your plan has the last laugh, laugh back, laughing!

Because who wants to Fast Forward anyway? You might miss some of the good parts. I’d rather keep pushing the rewind button on my red Radio Shack tape recorder and be that geek who knows the lyrics to the songs from every Judy Garland musical ever.

And then it hit me. In my haste to show how quickly I could learn the song, I hadn’t really stopped to consider what the song was about, which was someone joyously playing the bass fiddle. I mean, I sort of knew that, but in my nervousness, I didn’t pronounce “bass” like the instrument—like “face,” “place,” or even “ace,” a word that was actually in the song. I pronounced it like “pass,” “grass,” or “ass”—which was also what I now felt like.

In art, the painter presents his canvas. In acting, the canvas is you. Over the years, I’ve learned to have a sort of distance from myself in certain situations—I’ve

In acting you have to have an objectivity that enables you to, at times, turn yourself over to someone else and let them do the painting. But this was my first experience paying more attention to the canvas part than the me part, and I realized both sides needed to line up. I’d thought it was mature and professional to do anything asked of me to get the job. I learned a little too late that day that maybe it was more complex than that.

I think part of our frustration/fascination in this arena is because we’re always holding out hope that there’s a secret combination of elements that will make something that isn’t easy a little easier:

But I’m sorry to tell you that, in my experience, there’s no secret to accomplishing almost any goal worth pursuing.

In television, “young people” are people ages eighteen to forty-nine.

To some degree, I get why our business likes ’em young. Advertisers want people they can convert, people who haven’t yet made up their minds about things like what their favorite paper towels are or what car they like to drive—people who might change their minds and switch to a different brand because of the ads they see. But as consumers get older, they decide what they like to use and they hardly ever deviate, which means advertisers need to move on to influence the next batch of potential paper towel devotees.

It’s a bummer that it’s even an option to appear more youthful by chopping off your ears and reattaching them in order to hoist up your neck flaps (this may not be the precise surgical term).

Another remarkable thing about Betty White is that she went from being twenty- and thirtysomething Betty to eightysomething Betty while maintaining the same wonderful quality she always had of just plain being Betty White. No matter what character she plays, Betty White is always funny, always smart, and always at least a little sexy.

Luke consoles Lorelai in such a generous way, even though you can tell it’s causing him pain to do so.

and that a tipping point in Lorelai’s feelings for Luke is the discovery that “Luke can waltz,” embellished with lots of eyebrow wagging on my part, for emphasis.

I contracted a case of man-repellent-itis so severe that it is still being studied by the Mayo Clinic.

Strangers were worried about me; that’s how long I was single!

One thing I learned: starting off with very low standards is a surefire way to ensure they’ll be met.

Ultimately, everyone who gets close to you is going to see inside your closet on its worst day, and their reaction to that is what will tell you if you’re going to make it or not. You can’t live an entire life secured in by Spanx.

Because here’s the thing: I was fine on my own, and so are you. But it can be hard when you feel ready for Happy Couplehood and you seem to have missed the train. As my friend Oliver Platt used to say to me about hopes and dreams I’d share with him: “It’s coming, just not on your time frame.”

But life doesn’t often spell things out for you or give you what you want exactly when you want it, otherwise it wouldn’t be called life, it would be called vending machine.

It’s hard to say exactly when it will happen, and it’s true that whatever you’re after may not drop down the moment you spend all your quarters, but someday soon a train is coming. In fact, it may already be on the way. You just don’t know it yet.

There’s more comedy in failure than in success, and it’s a much more universal language. At the party, the worst jobs also seemed to be the ones everyone felt most proud to have endured. It’s an accomplishment to do something well, but maybe even a bigger one to do something well when you’d really rather not be doing it at all.

Also, the best time to buy patio furniture on sale is at the end of the summer or early fall. Spring is when they get you!)

An important tool against self-doubt is just to ignore it. Forge ahead anyway. Just keep going, keep going, keep going.

I guess what I’m saying is, let’s keep lifting each other up. It’s not lost on me that two of the biggest opportunities I’ve had to break into the next level were given to me by successful women in positions of power. If I’m ever in that position and you ask me, “Who?” I’ll do my best to say, “You” too. But in order to get there, you may have to break down the walls of whatever it is that’s holding you back first. Ignore the doubt—it’s not your friend—and just keep going, keep going, keep going.

The end of any job, especially a long-running one, puts you in a kind of fog. I wandered around having trouble making simple decisions, like should I work out first today or drop off the dry cleaning? Dry cleaning first, right? Yeah, that’s the way people normally—no, maybe work out first? You go from having your days completely regimented to everything suddenly being up to you, and it’s jarring.

So real!!!

Sometimes the idea of doing something is the most fun part, and after you go through with it, you feel deflated because you realize you’re back to looking for the next thrill. Often, waiting reveals the truth about something,

Spend some time with just yourself and your thoughts and nothing to do. How else will you learn who you are?

If absolutely everything important is only happening on such a small screen, isn’t that a shame? Especially when the world is so overwhelmingly large and surprising? Are you missing too much?

Let the likes go unchecked and the quality of sleep go unnoticed. Que sera sera, my dears—whatever will be will be, whether we’re tracking it on our GPS devices or not. Look up! Look up! What you see might surprise you.

how some people have such a big presence they just fill up a room? You might enter, and before you even see them you know they’re there?

Plus, I’ve learned that being a professional actor without a clear next step in sight is another one of those moments to remind yourself that a train is coming, just not on your time frame.