The Season 2 Premiere of Portlandia takes on mixologists and helicopter parents, while Carrie finds true love.
We open with Carrie and Fred at a table at The Mint, a bar. Fred has a beer, but Carrie arrives at the table empty-handed. “I couldn’t decide what to order, so he said, ‘I’ll make you something.’ He’s a mixologist.”
They chat, while we see the mixologist, played by Andy Samberg, making Carrie’s drink. Fred notices that the bartender is looking at Carrie, and Carrie thinks she knows him from camp. The recipe includes grated celery and three liquors (one brown and two clear).
Andy takes over the drink and explains it: “That is a ginger-based bourbon drink infused with honey lemon and chard ice. Then building off of that base, we’ve got cherry tomato, lime zest. I actually made the bitters myself at home.” Carrie is impressed. “We’ve got egg whites, eggshell, egg yellows. Rotten banana.”
There are decent odds that that’s on a menu somewhere in Brooklyn.
It’s the best drink Fred and Carrie have ever had, and Fred tells her she has to answer. “He mixed you a drink. Now you mix him a tape.”
We cut to a river where a couple, Kath and Dave, are getting ready to drag their raft full of stuff into the water. But first they need to go over some safety rules.
Kath wonders whether they’ve brought enough stuff.
“No,” Dave answers, “but that’s what nature’s all about. We leave all our stuff behind.”
Uh-oh. There are people tubing in the river. And some of them have beer! One even has a floating keg. Kath is so concerned about the beer that she falls into an inner-tube and gets carried down the river, where she ends up waist-deep in water.
Dave can’t remember any of their safety signals, so from shore he writes a message and sends it down the river in a water bottle, just in time for Kath to arrive back on shore behind him.
Back at The Mint the next morning, it turns out that Andy has left for Southern California to work at a bar called WindJammerz. (Carrie: “Who moves out of Portland?”), so Carrie, Fred and the mixed tape get in a cab and head to Southern California.
When they arrive, the sun is too much for their Oregon skin and eyes, so they buy burqas and set off on foot. They trash the burqas at a restaurant, Around the World in 80 Plates, when they’re too hungry to go on.
The restaurant is complicated: “Would you like your slamburger on a traditional sesame bun, in a taco, on french toast or rolled up in a naan?”
They can also add a lobster to anything, have it all rolled up into an omelet or just pour Jack Daniels over everything. Carrie wants her sides covered in Jack Daniels because she needs a little kick, but when they find out it will take 40 minutes to get their food, Fred and Carrie just take some bread from another table and leave.
And then we’re back in Portland at the Women & Women First Bookstore, where Candace and Toni are hot.
Air-conditioning repairmen enter the store and want to know where the unit is, but the words “unit,” “box” and “equipment” make Toni feel violated.
Still, a repairman manages to find the problem, just not without offending the women by addressing them as “sweetie” and ‘ma’am.” Candace and Toni want to lend him a couple of books, including one that Candace says is “a vivid, vivid description of what it’s like to be a woman.”
All seems well as Candace and Toni bask in the repaired air-conditioning, until the repairmen want to be paid $300. They manage to get about $28 from the store.
We cut to a front door. A woman answers her doorbell to a teenage boy asking her to sign a petition to ban plastic bags in Oregon, but she wants to read the literature first.
A couple then ring the bell, saying the boy was their son, and they want to try again while they coach him. The woman is still not buying it.
A second couple ring the bell. They want to know why she won’t sign their grandson’s petition, and she still won’t sign.
Back in the family car, the son is strapped in a car seat, and they all decide to go for ice cream.
In California, Fred and Carrie have made it to WindJammerz, a loud club. Andy is wearing a neon pink T-shirt and neon sunglasses, and pouring shots. Carrie makes her way to the bar with her mixed tape but to no avail.
“He didn’t remember,” she tells Fred. “He’s just not a mixologist anymore. He’s just a bartender.”
But Fred has a plan: Carrie has to remind Andy of how they went to camp together. She sings a song about camp, and Fred plays pan flute. Andy ditches the sunglasses and joins in.
“I made that drink because I love you,” Andy says.
He agrees to go back to Portland and asks whether they can listen to the mix tape in the car. “The whole way,” Carrie promises.
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