What’s up team!! Welcome back to Park It and thanks for bearing with me on my hiatus. I just got back from 2 weeks in Portugal, where I did a WHOLE lot of sardine eating, wine drinking, beach sitting, book reading, and …. Parks and Rec watching. I shockingly only had one flight delay throughout the whole trip, although this one was so brutal it did strand me at home in VA for a few days longer than expected. But no matter — more wine drinking was done!
I wrote most of this post from the plane, where a man (I’d guess aged 65) sat next to me, watching the “you know nothing, Jon Snow” Game of Thrones episode for the first time. I’ve seen it several times so I knew what was coming, but the MINUTE Jon & Ygritte dropped their clothes (furs? capes? breeches?), this man jumped so high he damn near hit his head on the plane ceiling, clapped his hand over the two of them on screen, and turned as red as the fasten seatbelts sign. Unfortunately I didn’t have wifi on the plane so I couldn’t tell anyone about this immediately, but I’ve saved this story for right here, right now. It was a real effort to tune back into Parks and Rec and not watch him explode in embarrassment.
Last bit of housekeeping before I dive into it: exciting news from Park It!!!! This little Park It guy just hit 100 subscribers!!!! I won’t get toooooo tender but — thanks everyone for reading !!! This is fun!
Ok ok — on to Parks.
So now we’re back with season 2, episode 4, and our main gal Leslie’s about to go on a date with none other than police officer Dave, played by Louis C.K. She’s so nervous about said date that she enlists Ann to take her on a practice date. Chaos of course ensues.
I wrote about this for the pilot episode, but honestly, it really never gets old watching Leslie be a total mess. She’s the total epitome of unlucky in love, or (spoiler) as April says in Spanish in the next episode, “you bury yourself in work, because you are unhappy in your personal life.” There’s a scene at the beginning of this episode where she’s running Ann through all of her worst case scenarios of what might go wrong on a date — “one time I accidentally drank an entire bottle of vinegar. Once I went out with a guy who wore 3-D glasses the entire evening. Oh, one time I rode in a sidecar with a guy on a motorcycle and the sidecar detached and went down a flight of stairs” — and then reveals that EVERY SINGLE one of her examples is something that has actually happened to her. In real life.
After sharing her trauma, they go on the actual practice date, and Leslie falls apart. Some of my favorite exchanges include:
When Ann’s doing a talking head with the camera, and behind her we can see Leslie laughing at no one and nothing. Ann goes “is she …. practice laughing?”
Leslie giving a thorough history of the teeter totter, including the legitimate translation of the world in the original Dutch
Ann: “Just say the first thing that pops into your head.” Leslie: “……how big is it?”
Leslie, inventing a fake niece named “Torple” when asked what she’s been doing before the date
Calling the bathroom the “whizz palace” before sprinting back and yelling “it’s a bathroom! it’s called a bathroom”
It’s so refreshing that Leslie falls apart. It’s important that she falls apart. If she were this boss career woman who wanted to be the President one day and — let’s face it — can sometimes be a bit of a narc, we wouldn’t care about her at all. But the mess makes us root for her. We need to see how much bad luck she’s had so that when the right person for her comes along (…..coming soon, and thankfully it’s not Louis CK), we’ll know they’re perfect together.
What’s different about this messy Leslie vs. pilot messy Leslie is: this time she has Ann. Their friendship has come a long way in only 10 episodes and now they’re close enough that Ann will spend an entire evening with a truthfully unhinged Leslie on a fake date, just so she feels ready for it. I forgot how great Ann is, honestly.
In the time Parks and Rec was airing and in the years since, Ann and Leslie have been the subject of many “friendship goals” Buzzfeed articles. If you Google “female friendships TV,” the first search result immediately has a gif from Parks and Rec with Leslie talking about female friendships. Oftentimes these articles focus on Galentine’s Day (the fake holiday Leslie invents to celebrate her friends), or the crazy long-winded compliments she gives Ann. But these early episodes remind me of the real roots of their friendship: Ann puts up with Leslie in all of her forms (narc AND mess), loves her for all of it, and helps her work to make herself better.
She basically lets her be a total weirdo, which is incredibly refreshing, considering they met as adults. I think it’s so much harder when you’re past the age of high school or college or living with friends post-grad to spend enough time with someone (platonically) that they really, truly see all of your weird.
I was at a wedding last weekend back home in Virginia. My very best friend from middle school got married, and the other bridesmaids were girls I also grew up with. I haven’t seen most of those people in years, but when we all first met, we were total little freaks. It was middle school, so we’re all freaks, but my specific flavor of weird was book nerd weird. I had this pair of jeans I covered in quotes from books and poems and I’d wear them. Everywhere.
The quotes on them ranged from “do not go gentle into that good night” to “I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you” to “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” My RANGE! I took myself very, very seriously, and for some reason was constantly nostalgic for I’m not sure what???
Of course, we’re all a little kooky in middle school because we haven’t yet reaaaallly learned to care what people think about us, so the amazing thing is that those girls didn’t care one bit about my quote pants. They loved me in spite of them!
But then we all go to high school and most girls get stuck caring about what other people think of us much, much more, and it feels like that cycle never really breaks — or at least not until beyond the age I’m at now. Since then I’ve learned to censor parts of myself for the sake of social norms or maybe because I believed I wouldn’t make new friends with my quote pants out to play, so maybe I’ve thought that the friends I’ve made as an adult don’t always get the full experience. I wasn’t even thinking about this until I saw the middle school best friends this weekend, but I found myself realizing that a part of me has always thought that no one would ever know my TRUE weird like those girls did. At least not in quite the same way.
Watching Ann in this episode, though, kind of got me reevaluating. Her friendship with Leslie isn’t the same as if they grew up together, but she’s still seeing all of the weird and the mess just the same. And my friends now are certainly getting all of that too. My best friends are probably super confused reading this being like “…no we definitely think you’re weird. What’s the point of this post again?”
It’s just a different weird. I’m not out here writing quotes on my pants anymore, but the weird’s all still there. And my friends are messy freaks too! We put up with each other’s shit and accept each other and love the weird.
Not to be too 🤪 I’m weird 🤪 about all of this but — it’s just nice seeing fully grown adults in sitcoms being exactly who they are, and not apologizing for it, and even being held up as this bastion of friendship because of it. Even if who they are is someone who panics on a practice date and invents the name “torple” for a fake niece.
Tl; dr — Ann’s the goat.
I didn’t even MENTION the B-plot in this post, so the highlight reel today is dedicated to that! It’s excellent. The rest of the Parks department decides to see who can round up the most dirt about each other online, which leads to moments like:
The reveal of Ron’s alter ego, Duke Silver, a local jazz musician who the moms go CRAZY for
Mark revealing that Jerry’s adoptive mother went to jail for possession of marijuana, to which Jerry replies “I didn’t know I was adopted”
Tom’s green card marriage! Wendy’s from Canada, which finally makes sense to Ron because “I knew you couldn’t get a wife as hot as her.” And also explains why there’s so much sexual tension between Ron and Wendy
Ron’s been married twice, both times to women named Tammy. His mother’s name is also Tammy. That’s three (3) Tammys.
April’s pissed no one dug up dirt on her, like the time she rode a lawn mower through a Nordstrom lmao
I read, watched, and listened to SO much “during my travels” (I just caught up on Bridgerton and all I can hear is Colin saying “my travels” over and over again). After binging all of Hacks, I’ve moved onto binging everything Hannah Einbinder’s ever done, so I watched both her new HBO special “Everything Must Go” AND her episode of Las Culturistas. I can’t look at the moon during the day anymore without thinking about her.
I also watched the entirety of Jury Duty in one flight and it’s my new favorite thing. I can’t stop thinking about Todd’s chair pants (“they’re whisper quiet”).
AND I read a great book called “Hi Honey, I’m Homo!” (~ pride month ~) about the history of queer characters in sitcoms like Bewitched, Will & Grace, Ellen, etc. which was honestly really good and really spoke to both the sitcom and history nerds in me.
Enough bragging from me though about my travels. We’re back to regularly scheduled programming next week for Park It! Thanks for tuning in.
TORPLE! I vividly remember cry laughing when I watched that scene for the first time, thank you for the reminder omg 😆