Application for TLV

[lesliemonster]

User Name/Nick: Punchy
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM: itseggplant@aim/punchthethings@plurk
E-mail: funtimesornotimes [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: N/A

Character Name: Leslie Barbara Knope
Series: Parks and Recreation
Age: 35
From When?: May 2010, after the season two finale, “Freddie Spaghetti.” Leslie will be taking a deal that saves her department from a round of massive budget cuts in exchange for working on the barge as a warden. She’s actually quite excited about the whole thing, and is explaining it to her friends and co-workers as an “exploratory rehabilitation program.”

Inmate/Warden: Warden. Leslie Knope has essentially spent the last eight years as the warden of Pawnee, Indiana. It’s great barge training. She excels at a job that offers very little in the way of resources: her co-workers are misanthropic, her department is underfunded, and as the fourth most obese town in America, the very population that the Parks and Recreation department serves has little interest in parks or recreation. In spite of this, Leslie is able to inspire her co-workers to serve the community around them, and constantly aims to expand her department’s public works initiatives in the face of daily, soul crushing bureaucratic oppression.

A very goal oriented individual, Leslie is able to run the Parks department through a combination of optimism, pushiness, and a willingness to overlook people’s bad qualities in favor of their good ones. Take all of the dedication and love that she puts into managing an entire city and isolate that drive into helping a single inmate? You’ve got a warden that is going to work overtime to see their inmate to graduation. Her rehabilitation methods are likely to be rooted in community service and trying to understand the inmate as a person.

Item: A hand carved wooden pen. It was a going away gift from Ron.

Abilities/Powers: No superhuman powers, except an ability to do the work of an entire department by herself and to remain highly functioning on dubious amounts of sleep.

Personality: At her core, Leslie Knope is a woman driven by a sense of duty to her community. All of her actions, relationships, and life choices stem from a deserve to serve the town and people that she loves.

Leslie grew up thinking that she was born and raised in Pawnee, Indiana. The former turned out to be a lie, as the Pawnee hospital was overrun by raccoons at the time of her birth (she fears raccoons to this day). Instead, Leslie was born in neighboring Eagleton. This knowledge later rocks Leslie to her very core, as she has dedicated the entirety of her life in service to Pawnee. As a child, she enrolled in multiple community center classes. As a teenager, she volunteered in local projects. Sometime after graduating from college, she took a job in the Parks and Recreation department, eventually becoming deputy director. Leslie loves her job and has turned down other, better paying offers in favor of staying in Pawnee. Though she works full time, she also spends most of her off-work hours heading up various action committees to beautify Pawnee.

Leslie’s drive to work in local government has been heavily influenced by her mother, Marlene, a high-ranking member of the Indiana public school system with a reputation for underhanded politics. Marlene clearly loves her daughter, but doesn’t seem to expect much of her. They disagree pretty fundamentally in terms ethics: Leslie won’t play dirty in politics and Marlene will. One day, Leslie honestly aspires to be president of the United States. This may prove difficult because Leslie’s moral core makes her shy away from the more underhanded tactics that help most politicians advance in their careers. At one point in the series, she tackles her boyfriend to the ground rather than show a negative (but factual) commercial about a rival candidate.

Though Leslie has spent a lot of her life trying to impress her mother, she isn’t at all spiteful towards her. Leslie actually is at her best when she is trying to impress someone – be it her mom, her boss, or her co-workers. By the end of season two, Leslie still adores her mother, but no longer seems so anxious about pleasing her. There is no resentment between the two of them. If she hadn’t been pushing to impress Marlene, Leslie wouldn’t be the person that she is today – and as far as Leslie is concerned, that person is great. Leslie has a great deal of self-confidence, especially relating to her job. When she goes in on a project, Leslie never considers the possibility that her plans might fail. More importantly, she never considers the possibility that the people around her might fail – if she’s put her trust into them, the same confidence that Leslie has in herself is projected onto the people she loves. If she’s given you a job to do, she knows you are going to kick ass at it.

Leslie is confident in a lot of things – right down to being a giant ball of nerd. She is an Hogwarts-attending Harry Potter fan (majoring in potions on the internet). She drops Rodney Dangerfield impressions into important speeches, no matter how many times they fail to get laughs. She will recite the entirety of “Parents just don’t understand” with very little prompting. When she is feeling nervous, she will leave herself encouraging voicemails. She gets very excited about adorable animals…she gets very excited about a lot of things. She seems, especially in her personal life, to be almost entirely incapable of embarrassment. The only time in the series that we ever see her second guess her personality quirks are when they interfere with work responsibilities or when she is trying to impress someone that she views to be an admirable political figure.

Leslie is an avowed feminist. She strongly values her relationships with other women (“ovaries before brovaries!”). Her favorite day of the year is “Galentines’ Day,” a holiday that she invented to honor the awesome ladies in her life over a delightful brunch. A member of the sisters doing it for themselves society, she believes that the best way to propagate feminism is by raising up the women around her. Leslie is very encouraging towards the other women in her department, pushing them to get more involved in city projects and praising them when they do their jobs well (or even acceptably sub par). While her efforts might seem a bit too Pollyannaish in the short term, they really do yield long-term results. This is no clearer than in the case of April Ludgate, a misanthropic community college student who initially interns in the Parks and Rec department and seems to hate every minute she has to spend in the office. By season four, April’s demeanor towards her department has softened considerably, to the point that she steps up when Leslie needs to take a sabbatical and is able to effectively assist in running the department she once claimed to hate.

Leslie takes this same attitude of (mostly) positive reinforcement towards anyone that she mentally marks off as one of “her” people. She excels at utilizing the talents of the people around her. She overlooks Tom Haverford’s lecherous shell and iphone addiction and sees that he is genuinely good at the public relations aspects of his job. She encourages Andy to set aside the juvenile aspects of his behavior, but not to give up childishness altogether. He goes from living in a tent behind his ex-girlfriend’s house to being a gainfully employed, happily married man – something he wholly credits Leslie for. Even her boss Ron Swanson – an avowed hater of the government – steps up and gets involved in his job when Leslie really needs him to. In their own way, the Parks and Recreation department is the most dedicated government office in all of Pawnee. Not because they believe in their jobs, but because they believe in Leslie.

The same traits that make Leslie a good warden candidate – her zealous dedication, moral core, and work ethic – also color the more negative aspects of her personality when taken to their logical extremes. When Leslie believes that something is good, she believes it to her core. The same goes for things that she has registered as evil. This list can be very fickle: libraries and salad top it, despite a paradoxical love of reading and interest in public health. Leslie is competitive, gets grudges very easily, and holds them for a long time, usually when someone has belittled her job or town. At one point, she threatens to waterboard a teenage boy that she suspects has vandalized her office. At a work function, she threatened to wave a man’s decapitated head on a stick in front of his weeping mother because from her point of view, he had betrayed her.

Her threats are mostly all talk. Leslie is susceptible to temper tantrums, and when she believes that her course of action is for the best, it is nearly impossible to convince her otherwise. Often, her friends will let Leslie’s disastrous battle plans play themselves out, because there is little use asking her to change them. However, when confronted with her failures, Leslie often grows and modifies her behavior in the future. She is able to recognize when she goes overboard, and always tries to make up for her wrongdoings. That is all well and good in Pawnee, where a poor choice will just lead to budget cuts, food poisoning, or further raccoon infestation. However, consequences on the barge can potentially be much more dire. To survive, Leslie is going to have to learn to handle conflict more maturely than she’s used to. Though she has signed on to help an inmate, there is a lot of room in the game for Leslie to grow as well.

In TLV, Leslie plans to be heavily involved in community activities. Helping one inmate isn’t going to be enough for her. She’s already got a 21 point list for community improvement. She craves the feeling you get from working alongside other people, and will likely seek to recreate a sense the workplace camaraderie that she is used to. She doesn’t need particularly gregarious people to accomplish that. Leslie has a wide range of friends, many of whom hate people. She puts on an enthusiastic front, but she will not come into the barge expecting to be liked.

Leslie would be a good warden for a large range of personality types, and would strive to get to know her inmate well. Having a personal relationship with them would be important to her. However, inmates whose past crimes include any sexual kind of assault would not be an good match for her. While she would feel that everyone on the barge is entitled to a second chance, she likely wouldn’t see past those particular crimes. Everyone else is fair game.

History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Knope
http://www.knope2012.com/ (Not history, per say. Set post-barge canon, but still has a lot of info on Leslie’s political beliefs and community)

Sample Journal Entry:

Hello, Paw – um. Wait a—

[The screen comes up, and the viewer is treated to a lovely close up shot of a single, blue eye. Then a nose, and then there’s the rest of her! Leslie sits at her desk chair, wearing a blue blazer set that she specifically purchased for today. She clears her throat, and smiles.]

Hello. I am Leslie Knope, from Pawnee, Indiana. United States. Planet Earth. [A pause. How cool is this!?] I really admire the work that you all are doing here, and I am so happy for the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and pitch in. Metaphorically. Phorically, I would possibly change my shirt first and then help however I can.

[If anyone needs her to help build cabinets, she has a toolbox – no, Leslie! Stay on topic.] I’ve got a few ideas for upcoming community activities! Now, what is the status of your parks around here?

Sample RP:

Leslie was terrible at packing for weekend trips. She always brought three sweater sets too many and overestimated the amount of novels she would realistically be able to finish over the course of three days.

She was going to be on the barge substantially longer than three days. Her solution to over packing was to drastically under pack. And then over pack again. And then call Ann Perkins at seven in the morning in coffee and tears. Beautiful, devious Ann, who made Leslie take a nap and then packed the bags while she slept. When Leslie opened her suitcase, resting on top of her tasteful pantsuits was a small, black journal with a post-it note on top.

“For all your ideas! You’ll probably fill it up two days in. I went ahead and got you started with two good ones.”

“Ann Perkins, you majestic flight attendant of my dream ships.” Leslie opened the notebook. When she read the first line, the noise that came from her mouth was not unlike a whining puppy. A happy, sad, incredibly lucky whining puppy.

“Leslie’s Idea Book.

1. Don’t forget Pawnee.
2. Kick ass.”

Special Notes: Leslie is very aware of certain aspects of pop culture, especially Harry Potter. She will take a DADT approach to the whole thing, though. Geeking out in private is one thing, but it seems pretty rude to tell a fictional character that they're fictional. Your mom is a fictional character.

No, sorry. She is probably a lovely woman.