Tiny Hot Dogs

INTRODUCTION:

TINY HOT DOGS

When I was eight years old, my father came home with a VCR—which, if you don’t remember, was the size of a Cadillac—and a VHS tape of Carl Reiner’s film The Jerk.

I’m 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 you’ve made your purchase) and watch this cinematic masterpiece. Or here’s 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 him—a defining point in his existence, if you will—and 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-go’d, I was watching The Jerk—every 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 family—which included my mom, my dad, my perfectly styled for the 1980s older sister, and an assortment of grandparents—was. 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, we’re 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 pre–Lena Dunham. Unique and special weren’t 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 Alzheimer’s 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 Jewish—so 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 I’m 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… I’m 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 they’re 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, It’s Mary not Mayor!

Back to my one eyebrow. I was so uncool that other people’s 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 caterer’s 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.

Fast-forward to 1997. Macchio Kahlo graduated Georgetown University (another place I didn’t really belong) and arrived in New York to pursue another highly unattainable dream: an acting career. Yes, I was going to be an actress. I was going to make it in the city that never sleeps. How did it go? Put it this way… I had a better chance of being Jewish. The closest I ever got to stardom was hanging Lorne Michael’s coat while working at celebrity mecca Nobu during a short stint as a coat check attendant. But I approached every small gig or audition as my next big break, blindly and happily guided by my wildly unrealistic optimism until it ran dry.

Defeated and broke, I answered an ad in the New York Times for a sales position at a catering company that boasted clients in the arts, fashion, and entertainment. Little did I know that this job, which I took with no greater aspiration than to no longer bounce checks at Blockbuster Video, would end up being my greatest role.

Here I was reunited with that silver tray containing my salty, buttery, glistening little friends… those tiny hot dogs. Very quickly I decided to trade in one dream for another and follow that tray, maybe not literally, like I did when I was thirteen around bedazzled event spaces, but in a real way. Real for me, at least. I stopped worrying about when I’d get my big break on Broadway. I stopped worrying about being/looking/acting like everyone else. I stopped worrying about what I had to do with my big fancy degree.

And oh, the places we would go, me and those tiny hot dogs on a silver tray. This tray took me to parties where I would meet Sophia Loren, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé, onto billionaires’ yachts, into Kevin Klein’s living room (while he was preparing for the role of Cole Porter), and even into Carolina Herrera’s kitchen behind her kitchen. (Yes, that’s a real thing.)

Ultimately, my “Navintude,” as I’ve come to call it, and those tiny hot dogs gave me the chutzpah to create my business, cook grilled cheese with the Barefoot Contessa, dine on a Caesar salad with Robert De Niro, and cause Jimmy Fallon to laugh so hard that he spit out his wine. It also helped me become a mom (after eleven doctors told me I couldn’t) and laugh in the face of that William Morris agent who said I didn’t have “a face for TV” every time I’m on The Rachael Ray Show.

Listen, it has not been as easy as it sounds. Like Navin, I stumbled over obstacles—both in my personal and professional life—that even my sunny optimism couldn’t clear. But also like Navin, I saw adventures even in my misadventures and came out on top—or at least I came out laughing.

To all of this, I smile and keep on moving, but, just between you and me, occasionally I do sit and ponder, Am I talented, am I lucky, or am I just The Jerk?