Mary Giuliani - Tiny Hot Dogs: A Memoir in Small Bites

The term pigs in a blanket often refers to hot dogs or Vienna, cocktail, or breakfast/link sausages wrapped in biscuit, pancake, or croissant dough and then baked. The first written record of pigs in a blanket occurs in Betty Crockers Cookbook for Boys and Girls in 1957. For a small kid, they can be a full meal. Most adults do not admit to enjoying them as much as they do.

When I was eight years old, my father came home with a VCRwhich, if you dont remember, was the size of a Cadillacand a VHS tape of Carl Reiners film The Jerk.

Im crossing my fingers that most of you have seen The Jerk. If not, I beg you to drop this book (please not in the store but preferably at home after youve made your purchase) and watch this cinematic masterpiece. Or heres a quick synopsis: In The Jerk, Navin Johnson (played by Steve Martin) is a hugely delusional optimist who believes he was born a poor black child in Mississippi. He was not; he is actually white. Upon hearing a song on the radio, he is inspired to leave his loving and overprotective family and head out on an adventure to be somebody. Shortly into his journey, he lands a job at a gas station in St. Louis and is thrilled to discover his name printed in the new phone book. This is a watershed moment for hima defining point in his existence, if you willand gives him the courage to embark on one misadventure to another as he dodges gunfire, joins the carnival, invents gadgets, becomes a millionaire, and finds love in the arms of his beautiful girlfriend, Marie, played by the great Bernadette Peters.

Why is this important? Because Navin Johnson is my hero. While my other friends at the time were listening to Wham! and waking up before they go-god, I was watching The Jerkevery night. This went on for an entire year. I became the sole student in the Academy of Navin Johnson. I chose at a very early age to be, like Navin, optimistically delusional.

Navin was also the first person to properly encapsulate exactly how I felt growing up in that I deeply loved my family and the town in which I grew up but felt an enormous disconnect from both. Like Navin, who was white and wanted to be black, I was Italian and wanted to be Jewish. I grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, a suburb located about eighteen miles from New York City. Population breakdown when I was growing up: 99 percent Jewish. Exceptions to that demographic: my Jesus-loving, al-dente-spaghetti-eating Italian family.

Pause. I think I need to explain the kind of Italians my familywhich included my mom, my dad, my perfectly styled for the 1980s older sister, and an assortment of grandparentswas. We were not the second-generation kind that speaks Italian beautifully, cans their own sauce in the garage, or visits cousins in Tuscany every summer. No, were third-generation Italian. We quote Goodfellas like scripture, we call tomato sauce the sauce, we speak Godfather I and II Italian, we enjoy white leather in the summer, and we are most comfortable when the bride and groom enter their wedding reception via a fog pit with the theme from Rocky playing.

To add insult to injury, puberty was not my friend. In those formative years, the nickname bestowed upon me by my friends was Macchio Kahlo. Macchio, because I resembled Ralph Macchio in his breakaway role in the smash film Karate Kid, which was the number-one movie around the world for eighteen months. And Kahlo, because I had one eyebrow, and, lucky for me, there was a kid in my class who took an early interest in art history.

Note: I know some of you (my mother) are thinking that I was unique and special in a darling way. That I was kooky and lovable. Wrong. This was preLena Dunham. Unique and special werent celebrated back then. This was 1985, and I was just the weird girl who sang The Thermos Song from The Jerk aloud to no audience.

Second note: when I say no audience, I mean that literally. I had very few friends, unless of course you count my hero, my Papa Charlie, a.k.a. my best friend, who loved four things equally: cocktails, cigarettes, Carvel ice cream, and me. His wife, my Grandma Mary (my namesake), had Alzheimers disease, so while Papa and I were dressing up as a cadre of aging 1970s TV stars (we loved watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island in costume), Grandma could often be found vacuuming our front lawn in her nightgown or attempting to cook the Thanksgiving turkey in our linen closet.

So here I am: friendless, hairy, deeply uncool. And not Jewishso not Jewish. And I really tried. I wanted to be Jewish so badly that I electively went to Hebrew school with my best friend, Lauren. I attended so often that I can recite the entire hoftorah, and Im fairly certain I was the only Italian eight-year-old who looked into the Shabbos Goy program at the nearby Long Island Jewish Hospital. When my father asked me what that was and I replied, You know. Shabbos Goy Im going to push the elevator buttons for the Orthodox Jews at the hospital on Saturdays, I was met with a double helping of that look parents reserve for their most worrisome child, the one about whom theyre just not sure.

On the rare days the kids called me by my real name, Mary, I almost longed for the moniker Macchio Kahlo because the name Mary was yet one more reminder of just how far from Jewish I was. (Sidebar: I would gladly accept being called Macchio these days instead of the man I am mistaken for on a daily basis: former Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani! For the record, Its Mary not Mayor!

Back to my one eyebrow. I was so uncool that other peoples parents took pity on me and forced their kids to invite me to all the parties. So in 1986, I attended 178 bar/bat mitzvahs. Picture, if you will, a unibrowed Ralph Macchio dressed in a poufy pink dress attending two or three of these soirees a weekend.

Where was Macchio Kahlo during these extravagant rites of passage? Not being pursued by a cute boy name Seth from Syosett. Not holding hands with Ali Cohen and all the cool girls during the Horah circle. Nope. Macchio Kahlo could be found, Sabbath after Sabbath, parked outside the door to the caterers kitchen, waiting for the silver tray of those shiny, buttery, salty, perfect little tiny hot dogs also known as pigs in a blanket. I guess you could say, this is where the love affair began.