I know one Italian ‘Jersey Girl’ who couldn’t care less about a bunch of ‘cafones’ at the ‘Jersey Shore’

BY CARL GOLDEN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

I'm not of Italian heritage, so its a little more difficult for me to identify with those who have expressed their outrage over the MTV reality show, "Jersey Shore," which follows a group of young adults who refer to themselves as "Guido" as they party — with clothes and without — for a summer at Seaside Heights.

While my ethnic background is a Mulligan stew — a little bit of this and that, and a little of what ever's left over — my wife of nearly 18 years is full-blooded Italian, born in Newark, raised in Orange and, while she may not agree, she is an example of the "Jersey Girl" immortalized in song by Bruce Springsteen.

She's taught me a great many things over the course of our marriage.

First, it's not spaghetti, its macaroni. And, it's not sauce that's on it, its gravy. Buying pre-made sauce in a jar at the supermarket is a class A felony, while buying it in a can is a capital offense.

For dessert once, I asked for a cannoli, pronounced just the way it's spelled, long o and ending with a long e sound.

How was I to know that it's pronounced con-ooooooo-le, emphasis on the very long o followed by a silent e?

The first time I joined her at a family dinner, I was sternly ordered to mangia. My first thought was that I was using the wrong fork, but was quickly told that it meant "eat and enjoy."

I learned, too, that a kitchen without garlic is like a kitchen without a refrigerator.

When I pointed out to my wife the controversy over the "Jersey Shore" show, she muttered "cafones, cafones." While the Italian-to-English dictionary defines this as "a boor," my wife says it's really a low life, someone whose lunch remnants can be found on his shirt sleeve.

She's justly and deeply proud of her Italian heritage, talking occasionally about her grandfather arriving at Ellis Island as a teenager, and about her father taken captive by the Germans during World War II as he fought with the American Army in the Italian campaign.

The Catholic faith she grew up in remains strong, although she thinks the beauty and mystique of the Mass was lost when it stopped being sung in Latin.

As a pro-choice woman, she's at odds with the teaching of her Church but it hasn't affected her respect for it. She was angered, though, when her request to baptize our daughter — adopted from China — was declined because I am a divorced non-Catholic and the witnesses we had chosen for the ceremony were not all of the Catholic faith.

She observes many of the family rituals of the Church, refraining from meat on certain days, for instance, and she's unable to disguise her irritation over our local school district's failure to close in observance of Columbus Day.

She understands and appreciates the indignation expressed over the "Jersey Shore" show but she's not offended by the program's depiction of Italian youth with super charged libidos any more than she was troubled by the portrayal on "The Sopranos" of Italian men as a bunch of whack-happy button men with funny nicknames or compulsive philanderers.

She's watched the "Godfather" trilogy and "Goodfellas" for the entertainment provided by superb acting, not because she wanted a cinematic lesson in Italian culture.

She's quick to chuckle at comedians who satirize Italians with broad strokes, like gum-cracking women with beehive hairdos working in a beauty salon, and can pull off a fairly impressive imitation of one herself, much to the amusement of our daughters.

She takes pride in her culinary skills and, after dining in the Italian Pavilion during a visit to Disney World's Epcot a few years ago, remarked on the fare, "Not as good as mine."

There is no effort on her part to diminish or minimize the beliefs of those who have demanded the "Jersey Shore" be removed from the air. Obviously, the show has attracted sponsors willing to front significant sums of money in the hopes the series will return their investments with even more significant sums of consumer dollars spent on their products.

It is, after all, entertainment, remarkably tasteless certainly, but no more so than a great many other offerings beamed into living rooms and family rooms on a nightly basis. The cries of outrage and demands by government officials in particular to toss the show off the air accomplish what similar past actions have always accomplished — an increase in viewership to see what the fuss is all about.

If the series turns into a dog, then so be it. The marketplace will make that decision. Let's face it, MTV is not known for its intellectually stimulating programming. The M could easily stand for Mindless.

As for my Italian mate, her take on it is pretty straightforward: "I've got better and more important things to do than watch a bunch of tattooed cafones run around in the sand all day drinking beer and jump from one bedroom to another all night in Seaside Heights."

Carl Golden served as press secretary for Govs. Kean and Whitman.