A good old fashioned prairie drink-off
Leslie's a weird drunk
It has come to my attention that friends have responded to my form about Park It stickers and I didn’t realize it because I had my google form notifications turned off. Sooooo that’s my bad for leaving you hanging for months. Stickers coming in the next few weeks to those who responded, still time to fill out this form if you want one !!
One of my favorite tweets I’ve ever seen said something like, “Being drunk is just doing the best sober impression of yourself.” I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it in 2015. It. Is. So. True. Especially for all of the ~ eldest daughter ~ and quite frankly ~ Leslie Knope ~ types out there, who are biiiiiig time afraid of breaking the rules. I saw this tweet back when I was in high school, so the image that always pops into my head is me — hammered — walking into my house after a party, running into my mom in the living room, and trying my absolute hardest to appear as close to Sober Bailey as possible. (Important clarity: eldest daughter vibes doesn’t mean we’re rule followers. Even Leslie dates Ben, despite Chris’s policy! It just means that we lose lots of sleep every night over what would happen if we’re caught breaking the rules. But I have broken many, many a rule.)
I’ve written before about how much I love when the Parks crew gets drunk. It’s why “The Fight” is one of my favorite Parks episodes ever. It’s not the only time the cast gets drunk together: there’s the episode in season 2 where Ann drunkenly kisses Chris at the Snakehole Lounge; the pilot, when her teammates throw her a party in the office to celebrate forming a subcommittee; the penguin wedding, when Leslie accidentally marries two male penguins and becomes Pawnee’s ultimate ally (happy Pride, Leslie).
I love these episodes so much because everyone’s SLOPPY drunk. But season 4, episode 2 showed me how much I also love when everyone’s just plain WEIRD drunk. We see it for the first time at the end of this episode, in the scene when Leslie, Ron’s mother Tamara (played by the legendary Paula Pell, she goes by Tammy), and ex-wife Tammy 1 enter into a “Good Old Fashioned Prairie Drink-Off” to determine who gets to “keep” Ron — aka, take him back to the farm?? Things take a weird twist…
Ron’s mother shows up, plucked fresh out of her gun-filled house in the middle of Indiana and brings with her an unlabeled jug of clear liquid that Ron calls the “Swanson Family Mash Liquor.” He describes the malt in tons of really appetizing ways, including:
“its only legal use is to strip varnish off of speedboats”
“we use it to burn warts off the mules”
“that stuff will melt the shell off a garden snail”
Mom Tammy and Tammy 1 have been drinking this stuff since they were born, but Leslie’s woefully out of her league. She gets hammered. And she gets hammered real fast. My favorite moments start at minute 1:35 of this video, when Leslie goes into her office by herself. She’s delusional, out of her mind drunk.
It reminds me of a great New Girl episode from season 2, “Cabin.” Jess is dating Dr. Sam (the first time around) and plans a cabin getaway weekend with him. But she’s too nervous to impress him by herself the whole weekend, so she invites along Nick and his situationship Angie. While in the cabin, they find a bottle of old and very neon-green absinthe, which they all drink. All hell breaks loose. Sam literally loses control of his tongue and can’t speak English words. My favorite scene is when Nick’s trying to eat a grape at the dinner table:
When I was lucky enough to talk to Jim O’Heir a few months back, he talked about how hard it is as an actor to fake being drunk. Which totally checks out. It had to have taken some serious god given talent to have acted the Snakehole Lounge montage scene. But I would bet it takes even more talent to fake being weird drunk like this.
Sure, you can replicate the actions. Amy Poehler can wield a sword and shield and act a little off her rocker in front of a camera. But something both she and Jake Johnson manages to capture in their weird drunk scenes is that insane, deranged blank look in their eyes. I 100% believe that they’re seeing some dark, scary shit in these episodes.
I just love the idea of a sober Amy Poehler doing her best impression of her drunk self, crazy eyes and all. And it’s hilarious to me that rule-following (for the most part), eldest-daughter (I’m just assuming here but it tracks) Leslie Knope has no fewer than five (5) instances of being so drunk with her coworkers that I’ve written no fewer than five posts about it so far in Park It’s history. Gal goes wild, and shit gets weird over there in Pawnee!
Now I can't stop thinking of the fact that actors playing drunk characters is like them playing their drunk character trying to act sober. It's a skill!