Person-centered Ethnography: Stephanie as Lorelai

My sister and best friend, Stephanie Haas, is a 21-year-old, soon-to-be-graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park. She will conclude her educational career a semester early, on December 18th—a date she knows well and highly anticipates—with a bachelor’s degree in Communications and a minor in Spanish, not to mention a 4.0 GPA. She considers her intelligence to be among her best qualities, along with her initiative, decision-making skills, and laid-back personality. “I can have fun doing anything,” she told me. “Even this interview is rather enjoyable!” Stephanie predicts others might describe her as smart and funny (perhaps, opinionated and loud, at times) but a generally enjoyable person to be around. “I think I would be friends with myself,” she laughed.

Where did such a socially adept and highly accomplished young woman get her inspiration? From the one person she admires most: her mother. Stephanie is grateful for her support over the years (in school and sports, especially), lucky to have inherited at least some of what she considers to be her mom’s best qualities (her decisiveness and sense of humor), and envious of her ability to “do 10 million things at one time.” She describes her mom as “a woman of the 70s. She kept her name, and she thinks girls can do anything”—a belief which Stephanie, too, holds dear.

Stephanie claims that TV plays a “huge” role in her everyday life, but not just any channel or program; there are certain shows that she is very attached to (typically realistic ones with characters around her age) and others that she is quite averse to (those that are action-packed or involving the supernatural). “The shows I like, I watch regularly,” she told me. “I look forward to them and I carve out time for them.” Stephanie will, for the sake of being able to watch without interruption, two of her favorites—The Hills and The Real World, both on MTV—be sure to finish her homework by 10 p.m. on Monday and Wednesday nights when they come on. She has even been known to decline offers of social engagements on these and other evenings for fear of missing her beloved line-up of shows.

Indeed the most intriguing of Stephanie’s relationships with TV is that which she has with a certain CW show, Gilmore Girls, a “dramedy” (part drama, part comedy) about a single-mother, Lorelai, and daughter, Rory, living in a small town where everyone knows their business. She owns the first six seasons on DVD and has asked her boyfriend to get her the seventh as a gift for their two-year anniversary. She watches an episode before bed each night and lets the DVD play all the way through as she sleeps. “[Lorelai and Rory’s] lives are just real enough that I feel like I could be like them, but just exciting enough that I would want to be like them,” Stephanie said.

And she is like the featured Gilmores—witty Lorelai and studious Rory. Stephanie likes that Lorelai is independent (that she “can hold her own”), that she can have fun just watching movies and eating pizza on a Saturday night, and that she is “always one step ahead while everyone else is trying to catch up.” Stephanie continually finds herself thinking about what Lorelai would do or say if placed in similar situations to hers, and often acts accordingly. As for Rory, Stephanie has always been able to relate to her conservative and somewhat bookish ways and good decision-making, not to mention the fact that Rory’s character is just one year older than Stephanie and went through the stress of applying to college at about the same time. So has Stephanie always been so quick-witted and scholarly, or has her regular exposure to Gilmore Girls shaped who she is today? Based upon 19 years of shared experiences, as well as what I gathered from the interview, I would say the answer is somewhere in between.