"Excuse me," said the waiter. "Miss, did you know that she just put a napkin on your head?"

I knew that she had put a napkin on my head because, when she wasn't looking, I had balled up mine and thrown it at her.

"How old are you?" the waiter asked my daughter. "12? 14?"

"Eleven," she said.

"And you are her sister?" he asked me.

"Mother," we said, together.

"I thought you were her sister," he said. "Sister? Or friend?"

"Mother," we said again, together.

"Mother." He giggled and brought her a free lemonade refill. "Mother," he said again, stepping back to survey each of us, as if he could deduce our story if he simply stared long enough.

In the opening scene in the first episode of "Gilmore Girls," Lorelai is sitting in a cafe. A Lothario in his 20s attempts to pick her up. She shuts him down, only to see him trying to pick up her daughter, Rory, several minutes later.

"Hey," Lorelai says. "That's my daughter."

"Your daughter?" he asks.

"My daughter."

"Hey, that's cool," he says, "I'm traveling with a friend ..."

You can see why the executives at the WB saw "Gilmore Girls" as an idea with legs. Two really great pairs, in fact.

The network had been asked by its advertisers (in this case the Family Friendly Forum, a consortium that includes Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson) to create a "family-friendly" show as an alternative to the network's usual sexy teen fare. And if you are a WB producer looking to fit a family show into a lineup that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar and Katie Homes, what better way to do it than to define "family" as a unit composed of two young, beautiful, sexually available women? (Or "girls," as they would have it.)

Next to the idea that one will be picked up by two gorgeous, identical-twin nymphomaniacs, I am told (I have been told, complete with leering glances), the idea of meeting a gorgeous mother-daughter duo ranks high on the list of male masturbation fantasies. (I really don't know how any of the men who have said to me, "Hey, when you are 34 and she's 18, you'll be hot," expected me to respond, but they have said it all the same.) And while certain single and divorced parents of all ages see PTA meetings as a dating opportunity, the presence of an especially young woman is viewed as a very special coup indeed for certain kinds of men -- like for instance, the distinguished-looking 40-something divorced father who hits on Lorelai in Episode 2. Or the cool 30-something high school English teacher who does the same thing in Episode 3.

So far, Lorelai has demonstrated the good sense to refuse to hook up with anyone affiliated with her daughter's school, but we do know she is certainly available. We learn she is a little bit slutty, too, when Rory asks her mother, upon learning that she has been accepted at Chilton, "What did you do, sleep with the headmaster?" We learn that Rory is not when Lorelai teases Rory about her plus-size eggshell fishermen's sweater by saying, "What is that, a mumu? Could you not find any armor to deflect those with X-ray eyes?"

The whole thing is a little grating, not to mention insulting, and you sometimes wish that someone in the scriptwriting department had had the imagination not to portray the chick who got knocked up in high school as a slut, forever promising to teach her daughter dirty cheers, with her daughter forced to play reluctant parent. But given the dearth of popular portrayals of mothers as spunky, attractive and sexually active, it's also somewhat refreshing. (And for the record, I stopped watching "Jesse," the Christina Applegate vehicle about a slightly younger, working-class former teenage mother, around the time she starting insisting that she couldn't date her hunky neighbor because Mothers Don't Date.)

But putting up with Lorelai's rather frisky dating life is more than worth it when it comes to her ideas on marriage. Cornered by her mother, who is berating her for having never married Rory's father, who is now a successful Internet mogul in California (of course), Lorelai replies, "By not getting married, we kept our bright futures."

I would like to see this motto emblazoned in 20-point font and underscored in red in every last textbook and advice manual for pregnant and parenting teenagers. Not that I am a proponent of absolute, one-size-fits-all advice, mind you, and I am sure there are some very good marriages out there that have their origin in a broken condom at 16 -- just as there are interesting, intelligent mothers who happen to be very young. But Lorelai's mother espouses the idea that the sanctity of the nuclear family, the irreducible need of a child for two parents, is so great that it is worth compounding the very real difficulties of an untimed pregnancy with the extraordinarily bad gamble that the cute boy with the motorcycle whom you like -- or even love -- in high school is in any way suited to be your life partner. That's ill-informed at best and dangerous at worst. Teenagers have enough romantic delusions as it is. They certainly don't need adults to pretend that a shotgun marriage makes economic sense.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.