Posey's Mary is saddled with the laborious task of finding employment. She's run illegal parties out of her warehouse apartment for years and one arrest too many sends her to the arms of her Godmother, the head librarian at a downtown branch. It's a glorious 180. It seems implausible that the film could sell this raver as a would-be librarian but Harry Birckmayer's script is so boisterous, and full of hit-you-over-the-head gag references (like a filing job consisting of a massive stack of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus for example) that absurdity is just par for the course. Posey was still only marginally known when she appeared as Mary, but talk about selling it. Parker Posey is Party Girl. This, among other factors, made Party Girl fit with the products of the post-Sundance indie-verse, which was full of films that, like Party Girl's titular character, were newly bookish and pretty excited about it.

"Its just that all men are sure it never happened to them and all women at one time or other have done it so you do the math."

This is the line that immediately precedes Sally's (in)famous performance at Katz's Deli. Sure the scene is memorable but boiling Sally down to that one eruption over coleslaw might just be forsaking the (real) mounting relationship for a(fake) conclusion.

Like the other women discussed here, Sally is a character based on real, if anonymous others. If we presume that the "modern" (for 1989) woman is confused about her options (family versus career), then Sally is the counterpoint to the confused woman. She didn't just know what she wanted; she was specific to a fault and relatively uncompromising. Well, uncompromising about her lunch order at least.