The Parks and Rec Open Thread

There was no new Parks and Rec episode last night (BOO!), but we didn't have an Open Thread for last week's Galentine's Day episode, so let's talk it about now, okay?! OKAY!


My absolute favorite part of this episode was Chris' DJing while he was super depressed. That was LITERALLY the worst Valentine's Day music I have ever heard.

Also, scatx and I were both rewatching the ice rink grand entrance scene ("Get on your feet!") from the previous episode like 9,000 times this week, because nerdz, and, while I was watching it on the 8,573rd time and laughing until I cried, I was also thinking about how genuinely radical the Leslie Knope character really is, and how radical a plotline it is that she's got a male partner who is profoundly supportive of her career.

That there wasn't an arc about his "coming to terms" with her career, that it was just taken as read that he was going to be her ally because her ambition was part of what he loves about her, is a really revolutionary departure from the familiar rom-com construction of a dude who "learns" how to love am ambitious woman only after he sees that trying to crush her dreams makes her unhappy. (Quelle surprise!) Ben is already a fully-realized equal partner, who wasn't written to "grow" for the benefit of men in the audience who are assumed to be unable to relate to a man like that.

I feel like P&R is saying to those men: We won't indulge your tiresome discomfort with ambitious women. We expect more.

And, in doing so, it's also acknowledging that there are men in the world who are and have been unconditionally supportive of their female partners' ambition, who navigate without some boner-killing identity crisis the negotiations and compromises innate to any two-career partnership. Ben, I thought, is kind of a gift to them. Here YOU are. We see you.

Tangentially: One of the things that I always think makes P&R the most feminist show on television is that there's no regular foil for Leslie's feminism, even outwith her romantic relationship. Ron is the obvious candidate for that role, but he doesn't actually fill it. He continually recognizes Leslie's competency and general awesomeness. But I digress.

I also had this sort of related thought about how radical it is that all of this is taking place in small-town red(dish) state America. I live in a small town in Indiana, and I'm involved enough in local politics I've got the mayor's cell phone number, you know? This show is about women like me. And it speaks to me, reflects some of the realities of being a feminist outside a media/creative career in a major urban center, in ways that shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Murphy Brown never did, even though I love those shows.

(It's also one of several fundamental differences between P&R and 30 Rock, which is a show I don't like.)

Being a feminist here, and being a feminist when I lived in Chicago for a decade, can in some ways be two very different things. I like seeing that acknowledged by P&R.

So, anyway. Those are my thoughts! What are yours?

On Hillary Clinton, Trailblazer

Last Monday, I mentioned that I'd been interviewed for a piece about Hillary Clinton and promised to link it once it was published. The piece, "Farewell to Our Feminist-in-Chief," which was authored by TigerBeatdown's Sady Doyle, is here. You should read it! And pretty much everything else in In These Times!

Although Clinton did indeed announce on Jan. 26 that she will "step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president's terms ends," I don't know that we're really saying farewell to her. In fact, I suspect we are not. Clinton has hinted that she will continue her work on behalf of the world's women and girls in a different capacity, and she may well become even more influential in the private sector than she's been in the public sector. Having the length of your reach unimpinged by bureaucracy is an idea about which her husband has spoken many times since launching the Clinton Global Initiative, and it's conceivable that Hillary Clinton still has ahead of her a path along which she will open all sorts of new avenues of influence and opportunity for women and feminists, all over the world.

But she will, as Sady notes, be leaving a huge void. With no disrespect to women like Senator Patty Murray or Representative Nancy Pelosi, who are awesome, neither has quite the same profile as Hillary Clinton—and the void of a passionately feminist woman with that sort of recognizability is going to be profound.

To me, it's terribly concerning and disheartening that she is leaving an obvious vacancy—that there is still only room, or so it seems, for one woman among the men, that US politics is still doing the Star Wars thing: If you're a boy, you can see if maybe you're more like Luke or Han or Chewie or Yoda or Obi-Wan or Lando Calrissian, or maybe a little like each of them, but, if you're a girl, you're sort of measuring yourself against Leia. Like her or not like her—check one box.

A continued dearth of multiple types of women inhabiting that rarefied air means any woman who comes after her will still suffer the same fate of being passionately loved and passionately loathed, like her or not like her, because there aren't alternative models of what being a woman in the upper echelons looks like.

And additionally, anyone who comes after will be compared to her.

As if it's not hard enough being a woman who has to fight the pressures of tokenism. Now you've got to live up to the bar set by Hillary Clinton. Yikes.

We've let her down by allowing that to happen, you know? She has borne the burden of standing in for "women" for her entire career, with the tacit promise that it would all be worthwhile because she'd be blazing a trail on which many women could follow. But after decades of carrying that imposed status of standard-bearer for the monolith, after it was used to try to discredit her over and over and over, still she walks away from a landscape fundamentally unchanged to the sound of dismissive shrugs: She hasn't proven that women are competent; she was just exceptional.

Check out this fucking irony: The credit for being exceptional which eluded her for much of her career is now being used to wave away the obvious call for gender inclusion that her legacy should rightly inspire.

How truly disappointing.

At the end of the Beltway celebrations lauding her accomplishments at the end of her term, once the crowds have dispersed and the music has faded, we will hear in the silence a collective sigh of relief from the Powers That Be: "Well, we weathered that extraordinary career without being forced into institutional change! Phew!"

We've still got so much work to do.

Which reminds me of a dream I had about Hillary Clinton once upon a time: I asked her, "What can I do?" And she told me, "Everything you can."

You Know...

...what I'm really tired of reading about? Some famous dude who's having all kinds of angst because his famous wife is more famous than he is.

If I had a dollar for every time I've read the construction, "He was the more famous of the two when they met, and now his career is on the wane while her star has continued to rise," I would have lots of dollars!

I'm sure in my history of reading things, I've read the reverse—wife can't take being eclipsed by husband's career. But I sure can't remember it.

(That is not, by the way, an invitation to offer up exceptions to the rule. I'm just making the point that it is, indeed, an exception to the rule. The very, very annoying rule.)

I'm not primarily directing my ire at the dudes about whom this is written, since who knows if it's even true, though it gets printed like it is; I know lots of straight/bi men whose wives are more well-known and/or make more money than they do who are super proud of their wives and not remotely threatened by a career disparity that doesn't conform to retrofuck notions of gender (im)balance.

A few famous dudes end up in "she's trouncing me!" stories, however, because they've said as much themselves in interviews, matter-of-factly, like, Of course it pisses me off and makes me feel small and kills my boner that my wife/girlfriend is more successful than I am. Have you not noticed that I am a man?

But it's more just that this shit gets printed at all, and the fact that it's still so easy for so many people to believe, in the year 2012, that OBVIOUSLY any man would be emasculated by a wife who surpasses him in any demonstrable way.

Oh, pardon me—not any demonstrable way. Straight/bi women are still allowed to be better than their husbands at "female" tasks, like changing diapers or cleaning the house. We're just not allowed to be better than our husbands at Man Stuff, like a career.

I Write Letters

Dear Parks & Recreation:

I recently wrote you a letter telling you how much I love you. And I feel like it may have been insufficient. Because I love you A LOT.

Also: I loved last night's episode (for which there are spoilers that follow, if anyone else happens to be reading this letter I'm definitely writing to a television show), and I want to tell you: I see what you did there.

Like, first of all, the episode was about Leslie Knope meeting her opponent in the city council election, and I'll come back to that in a second, but there was this great sub-plot with Andy and April about Andy hurting his head (repeatedly) and needing medical care. Now, it was obviously great because it was hilarious, but it was also great because it was this sneaky commentary on our healthcare system and how totally fucked up it is for everyone who isn't a bazillionaire, because surprise! Deductibles.

Every part of it was perfect: Can't afford healthcare with no insurance. Finally have insurance? Get EVERYTHING fixed! Before you don't have health insurance anymore! Wait? Insurance doesn't cover everything? OH SHIT. This system is so terrible. It is the worst!

Seriously, it was sooooooo great.

But ALSO! The main arc about Leslie meeting her opponent, Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd, such perfect casting), was the best! I see what you did there, too, with your sneaky commentary about class privilege and male privilege! And instead of making Bobby Newport some sort of evil caricature, you went all meta in an episode about Leslie not wanting to negatively campaign and made her opponent nice—just ALSO a super-privileged and super-spoiled dude whose entitlement actually makes him weak.

And THEN! Then comes the best part of all, where Leslie's principled stance against negative campaigning forces Ben to devise a campaign ad that is basically the greatest thing ever, not just because it underlines what it takes for marginalized people to close the gap created by the headstart that privilege confers, but because it centers as important the big dreams of little girls, which shouldn't make me blub so much, but does, because it's so rare, so goddamn rare, to see that on a television show, or anywhere, without those dreams being the butt of someone's joke. I love this so hard:

Video of young Leslie Knope sitting at a desk in her bedroom, labeled 1985. Behind her is a hand-written sign reading "Vote Knope." Ben says in voiceover: "This is city council candidate Leslie Knope when she was ten years old." Young Leslie says: "Hi, I'm Leslie Knope. I love Pawnee, and I want to make it even better—better schools, safer streets, and a more progressive tax on residential properties."

Over text onscreen reading "Bobby Newport, 2012," Ben says in voiceover: "This is city council candidate Bobby Newport today." Bobby, on a video, with a farm clearly green-screened behind him: "People keep asking me, 'Bobby, what are you gonna do once you get into office?' Um, I'm pretty sure I'll figure it out."

Ben, in voiceover: "Leslie Knope had better ideas when she was ten than Bobby Newport has now. They do have one thing in common—" Split-screen of Leslie with a stuffed toy dog and Bobby with his Afghan hound, both of them saying, "I like dogs!" Ben continues, over an image of her campaign logo: "For a better Pawnee, vote Knope for city council."

She's been thinking about the job since she was ten. Bobby Newport's doing it on a whim to get his dad off his back. I see what you did there, Parks & Recreation. I see what you did there.

And I like it. I like you.

Thanks. Keep up the good work!

Love,
Liss

P.S.

Ann, you are so beautiful and so smart.

Welcome to Your Backlash

[Content Note: This post discusses the encroachment on women's, trans men's, and genderqueer people with uteris bodily autonomy and the limitation of their reproductive rights and options, as well as the inherent violence of the anti-choice position and movement.]

Two stories arrived in my inbox in quick succession this morning:

1. Operation Rescue Launches Anti-Abortion Website: "Operation Rescue, an extremist anti-abortion group, has launched a website - abortiondocs.org - which lists the photographs and addresses of abortion providers, as well as maps to find their places of business. The website, which describes itself as the 'largest collection of documents on America's abortion cartel,' aims to list every abortion provider in the country." This is terrorism against abortionists and abortion-seeking people, or people who might ever have need of an abortion, plain and simple.

2. Long-Term Worldwide Decline in Abortions Has Stalled, and Unsafe Abortions Have Increased: "After a period of substantial decline, the global abortion rate has stalled, according to new research from the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization (WHO). Between 1995 and 2003, the overall number of abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age (15–44 years) dropped from 35 to 29; according to the new study, the global abortion rate in 2008 was virtually unchanged, at 28 per 1,000. This plateau coincides with a slowdown, documented by the United Nations, in contraceptive uptake, which has been especially marked in developing countries. The researchers also found that nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, and almost all unsafe abortions occur in the developing world."

On the one hand, these stories each deserve their own post, and I could spend the entire rest of my day writing 3,000 word pieces about each of them. On the other hand, they are part and parcel of the same issue, which is that the anti-choice position is inherently violent, whether it is forcing people with uteri who do not want to be pregnant to submit their bodies against their will to pregnancy and childbirth, or whether it is forcing people with uteri who do not want to be pregnant to seek out unsafe means of terminating a pregnancy—and there is nothing else to say but this: This is incompatible with freedom, if the word is to have any meaning at all.

This is an overtly misogynistic campaign to control the bodies of lives and women—and, by extension if not explicit design, a campaign that wants to wrestle away self-determination (and self-definition) from men and genderqueer people with uteri, too.

It is a violent backlash against the progress of feminism/womanism and gender equality. It is global, it is state-sanctioned in much of the world, and it is consigning people, mostly female people, to injury, to death, to lives they did not want.

This is not Woman's Work. The responsibility for turning this tide belongs to us all.

[See also: Misty's post. Respective hat tips to Shaker MinervaB and the Guttmacher Institute.]

Woman's Work

For a very long time, Democrats' agreement with progressive women was this: Vote for us, and we will be your champion. In practical terms, despite important pieces of legislation like the Violence Against Women Act and the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, being women's champion has largely meant making sure that progress women made wasn't allowed to backslide by standing between progressive women and the enforcers of the Patriarchy in all their guises—conservatism, religion, tradition.

But decades have passed with women on average still making less than men, still widely and primarily victimized by sexual violence (and still vanishingly unlikely to see justice for those crimes against them), still disproportionately affected by the nation's failure to provide a comprehensive and robustly funded social safety net, by unemployment, by food insecurity, by the lack of universal healthcare, by the lack of equal opportunities, by the lack of sensible and fair family-work policies. What social progress does happen frequently comes at the expense of women's reproductive rights.

Women who have multiple axes of oppression—women of color, women with disabilities, women in same-sex partnerships, women who are trans*, fat women, poor women, et. al.—are at increased risk of being marginalized and under-served by their government.

A government whose national legislative body, meant to be representative of the people, is still less than 20% female.

In recent elections, the Democrats' promise to progressive women has been reduced to ensuring (and only when it's politically expedient) that Roe vs. Wade would not be overturned, even as the GOP diligently works to render that ruling an empty statute.

Last spring, Shark-fu and I were talking about the blitz of anti-choice legislation in state legislatures across the nation, and she was telling me about lobbying in Jefferson City, Missouri—one of the many places bills limiting abortion rights are being considered. (The following has been published with her permission.)

Shark-fu: Jeff City was a train wreck. SEIU and others were there trying to stop the right to work bullshit. We were there trying to stop the 20 week abortion ban. And a whole bunch of losers were there showering the House and Senate with praise for giving it to the works and taking away women's rights. Ugh. I had a state Senator tell me that he "has" to vote for abortion restrictions so he can get other stuff done. The price of entry into negotiations with the MO GOP is women's reproductive freedom. I'm disgusted and dreaming of Canada.

Liss: "The price of entry into negotiations with the MO GOP is women's reproductive freedom." This is so depressing. I just don't even know what to say anymore. As I'm sure you know, the same legislation is making its way through the statehouse in Indiana. I'm not only dreaming of Canada; I'm dreaming of menopause, so I don't have to worry about the possibility of ever needing an abortion.

Shark-fu: OMG, it's so funny that you mention menopause! On the drive back yesterday I decided to write a post about how amazingly liberating it is to no longer have a uterus—every time I read a heinous bill I realize that they can't touch me. Sadly, plenty of the bills still apply to my post-hyster self. But they can't force me to get pregnant and that's so damn liberating it's sad.

Liss: If the fact that diminished cis female reproductive capacity (whether via hysterectomy, menopause, or elsewise) feels liberating for feminist women doesn't plainly expose how TOTALLY FUCKED UP the GOP's war on uteri is, I don't know what possibly could.

And then we lolsobbed forever.

This, then, is the situation in which we find ourselves: We are demoralized to the point of imagining, if only in passing, life in another country, or in another body, because we have been abandoned by the only one of the two nationally electable major parties who were even ostensibly on our side, who have negotiated away our alliance because doing so is the price of entry into doing business with the other party.

There is a presidential election coming up. The Democrats will not only want our votes, but expect them. And male partisans, having not learned the lessons of the last election, will admonish any feminist/womanist voter who does not axiomatically promise to give her vote to the Democrats that she is a fool who doesn't even understand her own rights or recognize her own best interests. We will be excoriated for even considering abandoning the Democratic Party, as if the Democratic Party did not abandon us first.

But this is not a post about voting. This is a post about the way reproductive rights are regarded—by the women who are actually affected by them, and by the party who purports to be our ally, and the cavernous divide in between.

My right to control my reproduction—and the respect for my bodily autonomy, agency, and consent that is embedded within that right—is central to my sense of self and my worth to my community and country. I can't put it any more plainly that that. The value of my very humanity is predicated on that right.

That right is not some piece of shit bit of legislation to be used as a dangled carrot during elections and used as a bargaining chip to be negotiated away in between.

And I'm angry that the party meant to champion women's rights doesn't see it the same way. I'm angry that there are so many male Democratic partisans (and not a few women) who claim to be progressive and yet think that whether I am trusted to make the best decisions about my own reproduction isn't a big fucking deal. Or want to lecture me about what a Big Fucking Deal it is when they're trying to bully me into voting for the party whose indifference allows the GOP to chip away at the scope of that right.

If it's not a big fucking deal to you every fucking day, then don't come shouting at me about it every four years like you're Professor Roe V. Wade, foremost expert in Abortionology at Gliberal University.

And if it is a big fucking deal to you every fucking day, then get busy getting involved.

Believe me, I know: Getting involved stinks. You're forced to deal with people who, on the best end, are deliberately obtuse bullies and, on the worst end, spam your inbox with pictures of dead fetuses. These are not pleasant folks, and I'd like to avoid them myself.

Unfortunately, that would necessitate closing up shop, putting down my teaspoon, and going silent. And then, somehow, magically not being a woman who lives in a patriarchy anymore.

This is the hard truth for progressive men who care about reproductive rights: When you leave the public fight to others, you're leaving it mostly to women.

I'll give you a moment to contemplate the many ways in which treating the feminist/womanist fight for reproductive rights as "woman's work" is some fucked-up irony, right there.

*a moment*

Now here's the other thing about leaving the reproductive rights fight to the ladies: Misogynists don't respect women. They don't listen to women; they won't acknowledge a woman's authority on her own lived experiences; they're not going to learn anything from women, and certainly not feminist/womanist women.

Misogynist anti-choicers who believe women to be less than need to hear that they're terribly, infuriatingly, and demonstrably wrong from men. Publicly. Passionately. As loud as the loud, so very loud, voices on the other side. One of the ways their self-reassuring bullshit works is via the effective void of male dissension, which supports their erroneous belief that they are the "objective" arbiters of womanhood.

They count on feminist men never showing up en masse for the main event.

They count on the Democratic Party being too squeamish, too spineless, too unprincipled, too apathetic to stand up for reproductive rights, unyieldingly.

They count on reproductive rights being the first bargaining chip on the table.

They count on the still almost entirely male leadership of the Democratic Party and the vast number of male Democratic partisans giving themselves permission to not get publicly involved, or to get publicly involved only when it's convenient and not all that risky and not all that hard.

They count on men trading on that privilege of not having to get involved.

They count on Democratic partisans being more interested in hectoring dispossessed progressive women than in being their allies and fighting this fight alongside them, every day.

They count on reproductive rights being treated as Woman's Work, and thus being devalued as woman's work inevitably is.

They are trying to overwhelm and demoralize the (mostly) women to whom this work is being left.

If the Democratic Party wants to retain its alliance with women, they'd better send reinforcements. And soon.

By way of suggestion, I recommend that the allegedly feminist staunch defender of reproductive rights, President Barack Obama, who happens to be currently seeking reelection, give some of his fancy speech-making on behalf of the 52% of the nation whose rights are being eroded. The states enacting a record number of abortion restrictions last year seems like it warrants his comment. Ahem.

[This piece was originally published in similar form April 4, 2011. It's particularly relevant again lately.]

Are You Sitting Down, Ladies?

I have some shocking news for you: New research has found, and I know this will come as a very big surprise to all you working ladies out there, so I really hope you are sitting down, possibly even at your desk at your job for which you are underpaid and overqualified even though you have asked for raises and promotions, that it is, in fact, NOT TRUE that women don't get raises and promotions because they are shrinking violets who fail to ask for them.

It TURNS OUT that women actually do ask to be appropriately compensated and promoted, but FOR SOME REASON we just don't get that for which we're asking—and, not only that, but "the gender gap in level and pay gets even wider" as the careers of men and women on the same track progress.

HOLY SHIT! This is some really shocking news, amirite, ladies? I never would have guessed that we were asking for things all these years that we weren't getting.

I can't even imagine what the perplexing reason is that we're not getting promotions and raises if we're asking for them after all. Oh well. Life is full of mysteries!

The Best Thing You'll Read All Day

Lakshmi Sandhana for FastCompany's Co.Exist: An Indian Inventor Disrupts the Period Industry.

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn't dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat's blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women's underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

Right now, 88% of women in India resort to using dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, and even ashes during their periods, because they just can't afford sanitary napkins, according to "Sanitation protection: Every Women's Health Right," a study by AC Nielsen. Typically, girls who attain puberty in rural areas either miss school for a couple of days a month or simply drop out altogether. Muruganantham's investigation into the matter began when he questioned his wife about why she was trying to furtively slip away with a rag. She responded by saying that buying sanitary napkins meant no milk for the family.

"When I saw these sanitary napkins, I thought 'Why couldn't I create a low cost napkin for [my wife]?'" says Muruganantham.

Turns out, he could. And, in the process, he's not just created an important product for poor women, he's also created an easily replicable production process and a business model that he hopes will "create 1 million employment opportunities for rural women and expand the model to other developing nations."

[H/T to Shaker Kathy_A.]

The Enlightened Thread

Today in Good TV News: HBO has renewed Enlightened for a second season.

When HBO first announced that it was going to air a series helmed by Mike White (who is great) and starring Laura Dern (who is amazing), I was extremely excited. I mean, honestly, to merely say I adore Laura Dern isn't sufficient. She is a brilliant actress, whose work I've admired since I was a kid. Wild at Heart's Lula is one of my all-time favorite movie characters, not because the character is lovable, or even particularly likeable, but because of the way she is played by Laura Dern.

Then came the marketing for Enlightened, which made me nervous. The poster pictured Dern in close-up with mascara streaking down her face, wearing an expression I can best describe as stricken. Still, I am well aware that the marketing of a TV series or film can wildly misrepresent its actual content, for good or bad.

So I watched the pilot episode. And it was...okay. If it hadn't been Laura Dern and Mike White, I wouldn't have kept watching. But it was. And Dern's real-life mother, the fab Diane Ladd, playing her character's mother, as she did in Wild at Heart. That was enough to keep me watching. I kept watching.

And by the time the series ended last week, I was a committed fan.

There are a lot of reasons I like Enlightened. The relationship between Dern and her mother. The exchanges between Dern and White. The subtle but incisive commentary on how do-gooding frequently can't pay the bills, if a path to do-gooding is even apparent (which it often isn't). The commentary on corporate workplace culture, and how it differs at different professional levels. For me, though, it's mostly about Laura Dern.

She plays the central character, Amy Jellicoe, with such extraordinary finesse: Jellicoe is an awkward, clueless, self-centered, privileged pain in the ass, but Dern imbues her with enough vulnerability and decency that she is a character worth caring about, even as she fumblefucks her way through each day, constantly disappointed by the people around her who haven't been enlightened by recovery.

It is a source of both humor and angst to watch her practice the good approaches recommended by therapy and repeatedly bump up against the disinterest of an apathetic world where healing is hardly a priority. Jellicoe, in Dern's capable hands, becomes a relatable character, and when I see myself in her, I squirm. But I also laugh.

And then there's this: Laura Dern is 44. She is stunningly gorgeous, and she looks 44. I want to neither explicitly nor implicitly condemn actors who make the decision to get plastic surgery or fillers, because that is a valid choice and an entirely understandable one especially in an industry that puts such a premium on youth and compliance with the Beauty Standard. Dern has simply made a different choice, equally legitimate but much rarer, and it is remarkable to see a woman with beautiful lines on her face every week.

The ten episodes of the first series of Enlightened were directed by either Mike White, Miguel Arteta, Jonathan Demme, Nicole Holofcener, or Phil Morrison, all five of whom give the audience something to which we are rarely treated: Long, lingering shots on the face of an actress.


We gaze at her countenance straight on; her face is not tilted up and shot from above, from the "male" perspective. The shots hold her expression, and let us look at her feel something. The way the show is directed says this person means something, and it was breathtaking to me week after week how radical it felt to me for that message to be conveyed by a show about its female lead.

Anyway. I'm thrilled Enlightened is being given a second season. I can't wait to see it.

Quote of the Day

"One great benefit of our relationship is that Megan has gone through everything a couple of chapters ahead of me, so there's an easy student-master quality to it. When your wife is a legend of comedy, you have to be a huge jackass not to assume the student role."—Nick Offerman, who plays Ron Swanson on my favorite show, Parks & Recreation, on how he and his wife, actress Megan Mullally, who played Karen Walker on the sitcom Will and Grace (and plays Ron Swanson's ex-wife Tammy Two on Parks & Rec), "negotiate[d] the disparity between [their] careers before Nick landed Parks and Recreation."

The quote is from a February interview, but Shaker alabee just passed it along with a note that it's a "great interview all around," and so it is. I hope their relationship is as awesome as it seems to be.