S2E14: There is an official government document that proves my dinner party kicked ass

The Parks crew breaks bread while I talk about Latin?

This week’s post is about one of my personal favorite topics: the dinner party.

I’m a huge fan of a good dinner party. I’m actually part of a group chat called “Wednesday Dinner Club,” which consists of 10 friends who have weekly Wednesday night dinners. A few of my friends love to cook and love to host, so once she started cooking her way through Alison Roman’s entire body of work in Covid, she decided she needed some taste testers. 9 brave souls volunteered:

Not at a dinner party but here's the crew! No idea whose dog that is

This group has now become one of my core squads, even though we only do dinner parties once every few months nowadays. We joke that we don’t need them anymore because now we’re weekend friends, but having that recurring dinner party to look forward to always got me through my weeks. There’s just something about sitting around a table with the same group of people week after week!

I took Latin all through high school, and my teacher would always absolutely lose his shit whenever the characters in some ancient myth would eat together. “Eating together is the ultimate sign of hospitality,” he would say. His name was Mr. Ross and he always wore these very Euro linen suits and scarves. Sometimes when he got excited about a translation he’d literally jump on top of a chair. I absolutely loved him. “It always means something!”

I was thinking about this when I was watching this week’s P&R episode, in which Leslie hosts a dinner party to try and impress Justin. She invites the whole Parks department (minus Jerry) and controversially asks some local citizens who teach classes at the rec center to cook and bartend for the party. Things classically get out of hand when she goes overboard trying to impress Justin because, if we haven’t noticed by now, Leslie has no chill. She hires Andy to be a server for her so he gets some flirt time with April. Ann’s acting very mature about the Leslie and Justin relationship, and Mark & Justin even get some polite chat moments.

Ron eating a seriously spicy pepper, no problem at all

Parks and Rec is a workplace comedy, meaning that the primary bounds within which the characters know each other is work. It sounds self-explanatory, but it’s a helpful framework to contrast P&R with something like How I Met Your Mother or Friends. Leslie and Ron are coworkers first, even though they grow to meaningfully impact each others’ lives in a much broader sense. She reports into him, they see each other primarily from 9-to-5 each day, and it’s not unreasonable to assume they have their own individual lives outside of work. The relationships are entirely different than in a HIMYM, where Ted and Marshall and Lily know each other from college. We know how much they mean to each other, we know that they’ve already impacted and will continue to impact each others’ lives. That assumption is not true of all coworkers, which means that we have to view any relational progress on Parks and Rec as starting from a very different place.

I think that this episode is one of the first times we see the characters’ relationships start to develop outside of the workplace. Yes, they’ve spent time together outside of City Hall before — remember Leslie’s journey to the strip club with Tom? Or her night out with Ann at The Bulge, Pawnee’s gay club?

But as my Latin teacher would say, sitting down in someone’s house for a meal means something wholly different than going to a bar with them. Leslie cultivates a list of 10 people to invite to her own personal Wednesday Dinner Club (please ignore the fact that she repeatedly says it’s a Tuesday….), and literally every single person works in the Parks department. She relies on them to entertain her new boyfriend and trusts that they’ll leave a good impression. In short — they’re not just her coworkers; they’re her friends too.

Tom eating the same insanely spicy pepper

Big problem

Prior to this moment in the show, we’ve been understanding our characters through the lens of the workplace, particularly considering Leslie’s hyper-professionalism. Sure, she had a one night stand with Mark 6 years ago, but other than that, these people are her lovable coworkers.

But this episode starts to show us that they mean more to each other than that. April’s starting to make certainly non-professionally platonic heart eyes at Andy, Ann and Leslie’s friendship has escalated enough that she invites Ann into her hoarder’s den (aka: her house), and we start to see what the Parks department really is: a group of real friends.

The bounds are still VERY tenuous, and it’s still important to remember them in the context of workplace professionalism. For example, at the end of this episode, when Ron learns that the revolving door of people coming through Leslie’s home are actually teachers from the rec center, he leaves the dinner party in a huff with a gruff, “my office, first thing in the morning” to Leslie. We’re still in the early days of learning that Ron’s a big softie, so I’m a little afraid for Leslie’s life!

But it’s okay that the friendships are a bit shaky — we still have 5.5 seasons and many more dinner parties to go.

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Quote of the episode: “That fish over there kinda reminds me of my mom … it’s just being really withholding.”

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Other best moments (because I can’t resist)

• Obsessed with the fact that the accountant who shows up at the end becomes the accountant who’s obsessed with Ben later!!

  

• There’s this moment when Mark shows up to Leslie’s house (which is a literal hoarder’s den) and he goes “it’s a lot cleaner than the last time I was here” and Ann goes “you’ve been here before?” and then they all silently realize it’s because Leslie & Mark hooked up way back when

• Ron asks Leslie if he can bring his own plate of deviled eggs and reserve fridge space for them ahead of time. King shit.

• The montage at the end of Ron being called into the disciplinary committee and deciding to answer all of their questions with a question is perfect:

  Disciplinary guy: “Did Miss Knope promise the teachers at the rec center to evaluate them at her party?”

  Ron: “What constitutes a promise?”

  Disciplinary guy: “A quid pro quo?”

  Ron: “Oh, you know Latin?”

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  That’s all for this week, see you fools next week! Can’t spoil anything but we have some exciting stuff cooking for little ole Park It very soon …