If you are a person who lives in this world, you know who Amy Poehler is and you know that she is a genius. You know that she made her way from doing improvisational comedy in New York City to hosting the “Weekend Update” segment on “Saturday Night Live” and having a film career. “Baby Mama,” playing opposite her real-life best friend Tina Fey, anyone? The iconic “Mean Girls”? The brilliance that is “Inside Out,” at which I cried more than I have at any movie since Mufasa died?
But of course, her most ubiquitous role, and the one that brought the most critical acclaim, was her portrayal of Leslie Knope on the television show “Parks and Recreation.” From the fledgling first season in 2009 to its emotional finale in 2015, the show centered on eternal optimist Leslie and the family she had assembled out of fellow government employees in the fictional Pawnee, Indiana.
This year at the Emmy Awards, Poehler was up for her last shot at Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, an award for which she has been nominated six times and never won, which, in my humble opinion that has no basis in anything but my personal preference, I simply cannot get behind.
I don’t claim to know anything about TV. I’ve never even watched “Veep,” the show for which Julia Louis-Dreyfus took an Emmy four years in a row. I know that my politically-inclined friend loves “Veep,” and my television-inclined boyfriend tells me to not discount her performance. I don’t intend to do — I can’t bash something I know nothing about. That would be unfair.
But I do know that Leslie Knope deserves more. Leslie Knope is one of the most important characters in television history, and deserves recognition for what she’s done for millions of girls who no longer think it’s uncool to obsess fervently, to love passionately and to work tirelessly. The lessons that Leslie Knope taught me were things that, at 17 years old, I really needed to hear.
At the end of the summer before my senior year of high school, I still did not consider myself a feminist. I held views that I now know are feminist, but there were still the tinges of judging other girls for their sexual choices and a small pinch of “I’m not like other girls.”
This was also back when I was deathly afraid of being too uncool. I wanted so desperately to be The Cool Girl, like that speech Amy Dunn gives in “Gone Girl”: “Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment … cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man …”
And I was so unequivocally not that. I was fresh off the heels of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, tenuously heading into recovery from anorexia. I loved One Direction and I hated sports (I don’t still love One Direction, but I do still hate sports). I was never going to be The Cool Girl, but God, did I want to be.
This was also back when I was falling in love for the first time. It was a classic summer romance in all of its cliché glory. One day towards the end of the summer, I asked him what TV show I could watch to take my mind off the fact that we’d be back on opposite sides of the country soon, and he told me to watch “Parks and Rec.” It turned out to be the second-best thing I took from that summer — him being the first, of course.
When I wasn’t filling out college applications or whining about how that boy from the summer didn’t text me enough, I was watching “Parks and Rec.” And little by little, I was learning about myself through Leslie Knope.
I was learning that, even though I thought that almost-18 was way too old to still love a boy band, I could unabashedly love Zayn Malik and it didn’t reflect badly on my character. I was learning that “feminist” is not a dirty word, and that I myself was one (I’ve since educated myself about slut-shaming and internalized misogyny, though). And I was learning that I didn’t have to downplay how smart or how sarcastic or how emotional I was for a boy’s sake, or for anyone’s sake.
If Leslie Knope could be loud about the things and people she loved, and be annoying at times about things she felt strongly about and be a hard worker and a great friend, then I could be all of those things, too. And it was somewhat of a feminist revolution for me to realize that I could be all of those things at the same time and not have to care about being The Cool Girl.
So Amy Poehler deserves all the awards for creating Leslie Knope, who ignited a fire inside me that has not since burned out. I am no longer concerned about being uncool, I am loud about the things that I love and I am proud to be a feminist. And these things are all vital to the person that I am, which is someone that I’m proud to be.
And if you’re wondering what happened to that boy from the summer: we’re now Facebook official.
