Feast of the Seven Fishes and Eight Abs

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Santa delivered my entire Christmas wish list with the premiere of Jersey Shore on December 3, 2009. The MTV show’s trailer promised an anthropological study into what could have been my life as a “guido,” to use the reappropriated ethnic slur that the cast wore with their gold chains.

I was a 23-year-old congressional reporter covering tax policy on Capitol Hill, a limestone- and marble-encased world closed off to outsiders who didn’t dress up their hallowed cultural traditions — gym, tan, laundry — in Brooks Brothers suits. “Representative democracy” was starting to set off my bullshit detector that blue collar white people of Italian descent, especially blue collar white people of Italian descent along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, love to say they are born with, baby.

President Obama was wrapping up his first year of illusory post-racial politics. The Affordable Care Act careened toward a make-or-break party-line vote in the Senate on Christmas Eve.

Obamacare wasn’t my problem, or my beat. I did not stay for the vote.

No editor could have assigned away my holiday obligations without answering to my maternal grandfather, an artisan as imperial as the museum-worthy granite statues he carved for the dead in local cemeteries. Papa’s sprawling backup included one-two-three Michaels named after him. Mom’s three brothers and their wives, my uncles and aunts; their children, my nine cousins; and their children — with multiplying Michaels! — expected my return.

I prepared to burn my fingertips on baked clams out of the oven before they singed the roof of the third Michael’s mouth. He always got to the goddamned clams first! The boiled crabs required nutcrackers and joint-by-joint patience. Shrimp cocktail; mussels in red sauce; sea snails that Papa would eat with a safety pin — behold, my family’s Christmas Eve, our Feast of the Seven Fishes, give or take a fish.

The Feast of the Seven Fishes isn’t an official feast day on the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar celebrating a rotating cast of saints, each a canonized pinup for your prayer intention. There are vaguely sourced internet results rooting the tradition in the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished, racialized South, rich in seafood and poor in faith in the Vatican and Rome. The bloody Risorgimento unified the independent provinces against their will into “Italy” in 1861. Anti-clerical and anti-nationalist, Southern Italians were my kind of people before Italian Americans flattened their ancestral history to Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, rudderless and ruthless, who would not live to see Italy or to be Italian.

The Feast of the Seven Fishes is a New World tradition, or performance. And every family is its own reality show. You’ve got your breakout stars, your troublemakers, your cast clowns, and, of course, the producers editing to their liking.

Who casts the roles? Can you recast yourself?

What happens if you want off the show?

I boarded the Amtrak Northeast Regional train, as I’d done dozens of times since I’d moved from New Jersey to Washington, D.C., for college and stayed for work. Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s bouffanted introduction to the Jersey Shore trailer, which I’d seen online in the leadup to the show’s debut on a channel formerly synonymous with music videos, replayed in my head.

“I’m going to Jersey Shore, bitch!”

New Jersey held different meanings for me over the years. “You’re moving me to the boondocks,” I cried to my parents, surprised to find more trees than smoke stacks in the Garden State. I didn’t want to be the 12-year-old “new kid” from Staten Island, the fifth and “forgotten” New York City borough that conjures even more preconceived notions of exhaust pipes and aerosol cans rusting in its defunct citywide garbage dump, Fresh Kills, a profane final resting ground for 9/11 remains.

Italian American groups opposed to the slur and stereotype of “guidos” and New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie (a real “chooch,” to quote cast clown DJ “Pauly D” DelVecchio’s favorite insult) complained that most of Jersey Shore’s bronzed and shellacked exhibitionists were not from New Jersey. “Cabs are heahhhhhh,” Pauly D shouted in a Rhode Island accent that expanded my limited worldview of the Italian American diaspora.

Three of the seven cast members were the kind of Staten Island “bennies” who pollute Seaside Heights — “Seaside Fights” or “Sleazeslide”— with their annual summer rentals.

Who casts the roles? Can you recast yourself? What happens if you want off the show?

Breakout star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino’s namesake eight-pack abs boarded the same white flight from the whitest borough to our adjoining suburbs, rivals in high school sports and privilege. Angelina Pivarnick, the self-appointed “Kim Kardashian of Staten Island” turned Seaside’s “dirty little hamster,” held to the gendered double standard that she fucked like a man and failed to clean like a woman, arrived at the Shore House with her belongings in trash bags.

“You're more like the Rob Kardashian of Staten Island,” fellow Staten Islander Vinny Guadagnino yelled at Angelina in a classic season one fight. The two would nevertheless “need some privacy” to smush during season two’s detour to Miami.

Vinny was the group’s pale misanthrope, the “smart” guido with a political science degree from the College of Staten Island. His abs, like mine, were plush. He pumped his fists and fought with his wits.

The closest Vinny came to a jab-cross-jab occurred in retaliation for Snooki’s infamous season one, episode five assault at the Beachcomber Bar & Grill. All 4’9’’ of Snooki kneeled on a bar stool, eye-to-eye with some knockoff guido who stole two rounds of the castmates’ shots off the bartop. The knockoff guido punched Snooki in the face.

Jersey Shore, for all its excesses, cut to black. The next scene opened with Snooki crying in pain on the floor, where she’d landed from the force of the blow. How the cast members and especially Jenni “JWoww” Farley punched, clawed, and gouged their way to Snooki’s defense would turn strangers into “roomies”– a family.

“Who the fuck hits a fucking girl, bro?” Vinny shouted mid-charge at another knockoff guido on the boardwalk. Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, the brawn to my boy’s brains, spotted the cops and shoved Vinny back.

If Vinny was the Prodigal Guido, I was the Prodigal Guidette.

The youngest of my cousins, the only one with a different last name, and the only only child, I always felt like a bit of a Vinny Guadagnino.

First my cousins doted on me. Then the baby became the annoying kid sibling that, trust me, none of them needed. I trailed them, and I told on them. I still want to know which one(s) played catch with Barney, my special stuffy from my dad, the singular brother-in-law and the only man who would get up from the table to clean. Dad’s fish salad — shrimp, calamari, and scallops, cooked and chopped, mixed with lump crab meat and cracked green olives and dressed in olive oil and fresh lemon juice — made Christmas Eve a feast.

I repaid my dad by decapitating Barney for my high school physics’ egg drop project, hoping Barney’s head would protect the egg and impress my crush. It did neither, and I hurt Dad’s feelings.

I was used to a quiet house: Mom, Dad, and Nanny, my paternal grandmother and primary caregiver since my parents worked 12-hour days. Since-banned dry-cleaning fluids cracked their hands so that someday I could write with mine. As much as I remember chasing my maternal cousins, I have half-formed early memories of retreating to my room, or a cousin’s room, or even a bathroom, from immediate family-only gatherings with a 30-person minimum.

Many of my family’s milestone celebrations centered around Catholic baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals. Even more of us would line up at the altar for our antipasto, the bread and wine consecrated into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in preparation for the main course at a restaurant or a party hall. Nitrates on the table, DJ at the mixer — who had it better than us?

Wasn’t there better for us?

If Vinny was the Prodigal Guido, I was the Prodigal Guidette.

Vinny Guadagnino would have understood my — what was it? Sensory overload? Social anxiety? In Jersey Shore’s fifth season, Vinny experienced panic attacks and departed the Shore House for two episodes, treating his generalized anxiety disorder that started in high school. He ultimately “wrote” 2013’s Control the Crazy: My Plan to Stop Stressing, Avoid Drama, and Maintain Inner Cool.

The cast didn’t want Vinny to go. I was familiar with that sense of duty from the mythology of the Italian American Christmas Eve, which no one — not no guido — missed.

Of all my family’s holidays, graduations, and just-becauses, the Feast of the Seven Fishes ate at my nerves the most.

Performance anxiety — that was it. I felt like a knockoff guido, struggling to keep up with family dynamics that had been established long before I arrived. I could only gesticulate and eat, eat, eat for so long. The only judgments I made were against myself. My outward, genuine enthusiasm for baked clams was never enough. I always crawled back into my shell.

The years my parents hosted, I’d hide with a book. Rereading a well-worn chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was as good as taking a deep breath, which would have drawn me further into “make your [insert male relative] a plate.”

No one noticed I was gone, until everyone noticed I was gone — “Where’s Christine?”

“Christine!”

The books became another source of my anxiety as I developed opinions along with my breasts. I grew up from a “pick me” little tattletale to a “try me” teenage killjoy, different flavors of the same annoying kid sibling. My relatives ribbed my half-baked white feminism, and it wasn’t even the good stuff.

By high school, I’d embraced New Jersey’s trappings. If my best friend Elina volunteered to drive us to Point Pleasant, a Snooki-sized step up from Seaside, we didn’t think to get out of the car. To pump gas in New Jersey is as unfathomable as it is illegal. Wawa Shortis in the cooler, Z100 on the radio — who had it better than us?

Wasn’t there better for me?

New Jersey’s trappings evolved into their own trap, in the natural order for teenagers. My dad’s offer to buy me a used car so I could stay local and return home every weekend for Sunday meatballs didn’t appeal. After much infighting about affording a private university, let alone attending one 250 miles away, which no one — not no daughter — does in Northeast Italian American families, my parents borrowed more money on my behalf than they’d ever made in a year.

I got the fuck out of New Jersey.

Much like the haze of Axe body spray, the specter of New Jersey never went away. I started interviewing for jobs in my final months of college in D.C. If I didn’t line up a journalism job that paid enough to split the loan repayment with my parents and cover rent for an apartment, I would have to move the fuck back to New Jersey the day after graduation.

I got lucky. The summer of 2008 marked an economic downturn that lacked the self-awareness to call itself a crisis until the fall, when I watched the banks fall from Capitol Hill.

Insulated in Washington’s economy-within-an-economy that rewarded access journalism with steady journalism jobs, the press corps covered the initial bank bailout that President George W. “War Criminal” Bush signed into law that October, while Senator Barack Obama was in his final presidential campaign sprint.

Obama officially hoped and changed himself into the office in January 2009, and soon after, the media retconned the villain origin story of the financial crisis. Within two years, nearly half of the U.S. public, regardless of party affiliation, would come to believe that Obama created the bailout fund, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Obama merely expanded what Bush started, like he did with the drone strikes, arguably becoming a war criminal himself, a right of passage for U.S. presidents.

Given the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories that have since “spiraled” like the Jersey Shore cast at Seaside’s late, great nightclub Karma, such misconceptions seem quaint. Do not mistake that feeling for nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a trap.

My first indication that Donald Trump would forever short-circuit the bullshit detector that blue collar white people of Italian descent love to say they are born with, baby, of course came from Facebook posts. Many Northeast Corridor Italian Americans expressed that the failed businessman who’d bankrupted Atlantic City would make a great president, sexual assault allegations not even notwithstanding.

Such 2016 presidential endorsements lacked the potency of “the note,” the Jersey Shore kill-the-messenger warning to Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola about her boyfriend, Ronnie. After Sammi left the nightclub B.E.D. in season two, episode five, Ronnie made out with two girls and motorboated the breasts of a cocktail waitress. The cameras also caught him “grinding with multiple women.”

“Multiple people in the house know. Therefore, you should know the truth,” JWoww dictated and Snooki wrote at an internet cafe.

I felt the same obligation about Trump in the final six-month stretch of the 2016 presidential election on my new beat, abortion politics and policy. My new movement journalism colleagues taught me how to hold power accountable without false equivalences. And Trump was only a symptom of the problem. I was the problem.

I could remember when Democrats’ chickenshit congressional majorities dropped abortion and the public option from the Affordable Care Act. The final bill “will be abortion neutral,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told NPR at the time.

Every complacent Democrat I’d excused in my Capitol Hill reporting years was the problem. Shitty white feminists wheeling and dealing away abortion access for marginalized people was the problem. A right without access was a right in name only — and yet, here we were, about to lose Roe v. Wade, too.

Watching Pelosi accept the gavel as the first woman Speaker of the House in 2006, I had the Italian American representation and the role model I thought I needed. A decade later, I fought with Trump apologists in Facebook comments.

“Therefore, you should know the truth,” I screamed in so many words.

My introduction to intersectional feminism would start to change me from the Prodigal Guidette to a stranger, or at least make me feel that way, as I headed into Christmas Eve 2016. According to tweets and memes, Good White People were supposed to “talk” to their Trump supporting relatives this holiday season.

I hadn't done the everyday work of living my values long enough to avoid making this about me. The leadup to Christmas Eve filled me with the mundane existential agony that tortures and centers white feelings — a story as old as it is boring. For the big night, I drew on performances of years past: The dutiful niece, the know-it-all teenager, and the long lost cousin, returned to talk politics one-on-one with the relatives least likely to shut me down. The rest of the time, I did as I’d done since I’d turned 21: I drank a metric shit ton of red wine in the corner and let the Feast of the Seven Fishes swim around me.

“Where’s Christine?” The more holidays that passed with the years, the more I would become someone I didn’t recognize, either. But I liked her.

Vinny Guadagnino was undergoing a transformation, too. Jersey Shore’s original six-season run ended in 2012. Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, the 2018 successor now poised for its seventh season with no signs of ending, is Father Knows Best for reformed guidos with middle-aged dramas and Angelina-sized spectacles.

Visibly ab-less, The Situation returned with an on-air wedding; an off-camera tax evasion sentence in federal prison; and upon his release, multiple brands and children. Jersey Shore fans can buy The Situation’s “Brotein Powder” or a T-shirt for “T-shirt time,” the ceremonial switch from a staying-in tank to a going-out top, with his new catchphrase, “The comeback is greater than the setback.”

Vinny returned with at least six of The Situation’s eight abs. The roomies roasted Vinny for his carbohydrate-designated “cheat days.” The rest of the time, he would peel and eat only the cheese off his pizza — sacrilege. He “wrote” 2019’s Keto Guido, becoming the self-proclaimed “New York Times Best Selling Stripper” for multiple Chippendales residencies in Las Vegas.

The more holidays that passed with the years, the more I would become someone I didn’t recognize, either. But I liked her.

I could still see the Prodigal Guido within Vinny. I could still see myself.

COVID did not stop Family Vacation from filming. Tested, quarantined, and masked, the roomies created their own “bubble” at a Las Vegas valley resort that production rented out in fall 2020. A family vacation interested me less than a socially distanced view of New Jersey.

The last time I’d seen my parents, in February 2020, was the last time I would see the inside of my childhood home in “the boondocks.”

My parents got the fuck out of New Jersey, too.

Was there anything better? Nothing appeals more than something you can’t have.

I recreated The Feast of the Fishes in miniature for my spouse and me on Christmas Eve 2020. A 5-minute FaceTime with extended family filled me with a lot less dread than performing holiday spirit in person.

Family Vacation became a tradition, must-see TV, through a COVID vaccine; my difficult pregnancy (Christmas Eve 2021) and a booster shot; breastfeeding and diaper changing (Christmas Eve 2022) and another booster; my mother-in-law’s brain hemorrhage (Christmas Eve 2023) and all the boosters to come.

Each Family Vacation episode could take double the viewing time while I paused and searched the restaurants and party halls where the roomies gathered, hugged, fought, and ate, ate, ate. The Situation’s first meal out of prison — Denino’s pizza — would be my last meal request on this Earth, should Donald Trump succeed in killing us all during his second term.

Trump’s resurrection may be the end of my “Jerzdays.”

The week before the 2024 presidential election, Vinny Guadagnino attended Trump’s 1939-esque “Nazi” rally held at Madison Square Garden.

Faced with blowback from childless cat ladies he’d like to smush, Vinny used his next podcast episode to claim he’d voted for Democrats through the 2020 election. But the radical college campuses with the wokes and the libs — good God, what scolds! Now he fucks with Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I should have known Vinny was a chooch.

My first clue was the retired stripper turned aspiring stand-up’s taste in comedy. “My pronouns are ‘ha/ha,’” Vinny tried out on his mother, Paula, in Family Vacation season six, episode 19. Paula was busy breading and frying his chicken cutlet submission for his friends’ chicken cutlet competition.

Nostalgia obscures what already exists. The places and people I love are what and who they have always been.

I’d forgotten Vinny’s full insult to Angelina: “You're more like the Rob Kardashian of Staten Island, you ugly bitch.” Even Vinny’s “Who the fuck hits a fucking girl, bro?” defense of Snooki had been paternalistic.

Vinny was who he was, all along, waiting for Elon to activate his inner incel bitch. What an ugly-ass “grenade.” I would not advise anyone to fuck Vinny Guadagnino.

In a Sliding Doors universe, I could have been Vinny. What if I hadn’t read so many books? What if I didn’t form opinions about politics, or I at least stuck to the guido party line? I might never have learned that Staten Island is more than the guido party line — it is Wu-Tang Clan, Audre Lorde, and Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls. What if I’d returned to Staten Island? What if I’d stayed in New Jersey?

I could have married Vinny or a real juicehead, Snooki’s name for a “hot Italian tan guy, typically muscly and loves working out, looking, you know, buff and brawly.” Snooki and her fellow “meatball” Deena Nicole Cortese live within about forty-five minutes and countless good pizza places from my parents’ old house.

Nostalgia obscures what already exists. The places and people I love are what and who they have always been.

“Never fall in love at the Jersey Shore,” Ronnie said in the 2009 Jersey Shore series premiere. His vow to fuck around and not stay the night to find out lasted shorter than a “Ron Ron juice” hangover. The second episode featured the hookup that would turn into Ronnie’s toxic and so obviously abusive series-long relationship with Sammi Sweetheart.

Nostalgia is a trap that Sammi avoided for years. Her return to Family Vacation occurred only after Ronnie’s departure for domestic violence allegations against two consecutive partners, including mutual charges levied by and against the mother of his child. Rehabbed and believe-it-when-I-see-it reformed, Ronnie returned to make amends with his roomies and guest star on Family Vacation’s season six one-big-happy-family trip to Nashville. Sammi coexists and collects her paycheck without so much as acknowledging Ronnie’s presence.

I only wish the same for myself this holiday season.

I don’t know if I can stomach Family Vacation’s return. I don’t have the energy to tell Vinny Guadagnino I hope none of his one-night stands will die of sepsis in a post-Roe hospital parking lot. He won’t care. And neither will Italian Americans of the Northeast Corridor, which is why I’m off Facebook for good and the Feast of the Seven Fishes for this year. I am too tired to fight with words when I may have to fight with my fists for every value I hold dear.

I can’t say I’ll never cave to the draw of Jersey Shore and the Jersey Shore. I wish the cast had been self-aware enough to issue a different warning. Never fall in love with the Jersey Shore — the show I called mine and the place I called home.

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copyedited by s.e. smith