Guido article in Washington Post.

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Strutting Season

At the Jersey Shore, Guidos Are Pumped for the Prime of Their Lives

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. -- Guidos belong to summer, and summer belongs to the guidos.

Anthony Moussa, 24, who runs a Web site called NJGuido.com, comes alive during Memorial Day weekend, like a Roman statue freed from stone, beautiful. The summer months give shape and meaning to Moussa's life. This is when he parties hardest, staying up to see the dawn. This is when he comes to the Jersey Shore with his buddies and fixes his hair and hits the nightclubs and admires the girls, again and again tipping back the sweet, fruity shot he calls life.

This is when Anthony Moussa achieves the fullest expression of his guido self. This is when he becomes The Moo.

"The bus is leaving now!" Moo shouts, just after 11 on a Saturday night, his hair spiked, his shirt tight. It's nightclub time and he's waited long enough. "I'm locking the door and you can all go to hell if you don't come!"

To understand the guido, a modern-day Jersey dandy, come to Seaside, a honky-tonk town with a boardwalk of neon signs and flashing light bulbs, where Moo and his friends flock every weekend all summer. This year, eight of the guys have nabbed a "palace," a four-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with central air in a house just around the corner from their favorite nightclub, Temptations.

Every Saturday and Sunday, they make their way to this club, where disco balls glitter and the dance floor is as crowded as a chicken house. The music is so loud it's like a dentist's drill in your mouth. Moo and many other guys take off their shirts, offering the glamorous guidettes an eye-level display of countless man-nipples. Here, rock-hard pecs are a sort of pickup line all their own. Moo always brings a digital camera to take pictures for his year-old Web site, which he hopes will transform the term guido, an ethnic stereotype, into shorthand for all that he loves: youth, beauty and flash.

"If it's changeable, I'm changing it," Moo, who is half-Italian and half-Lebanese, says as he steps into the club. He's grinning wildly. Inaction is a burden upon Moo, who gets anxiety attacks if he is forced to spend too many hours lying on the beach. The frenzy of Temptations serves as a balm for his soul.

"This place actually relaxes me," he says. "I'm in my element."

He looks around at all the taut, tan skin and spandex.

"It's all New Jersey," Moo says passionately. "It's like a cult." He recalls how he once described Temptations to a friend: "You can't tell me there's anyplace in the world where you'll find more beautiful women."

Like the guido, the guidette's beauty is defined in upper-body terms, but instead of muscle, her currency is breasts. Implants are popular. Cleavage is all. Her nails are pink or French manicured, her earrings are hoop, her top is tube, her tank is mesh, and she teeters on sandals with three-inch heels. Her lips are wet with lip gloss. She has the look of a varnished-sushi refrigerator magnet, perfect under the Temptations strobe lights.

Moo's friends gather around the corner of the bar they always claim. Somebody orders shots of Sex on the Beach for everyone. "You know what'll happen in here?" Moo asks, looking excited. "It'll get tighter and tighter and tighter until it's like this." He bumps one massive shoulder against yours, and you know something both thrilling and scary is about to happen.

The guido is breaking free.

It is Sunday morning in the palace, by which we mean almost noon. Moo and his girlfriend, Jana Brusich, 26, a bartender and part-time model, are having breakfast at the kitchen table. (In afternoons, this table is replaced by a long wooden board for beer pong, a game that involves throwing ping-pong balls into cups of beer and then drinking it.) Some of the guys are over on the couches, recovering from their night at Temptations, watching ESPN and giving each other a hard time. One is already having a beer.

"Bagel?" Moo asks a huge guy who has just stumbled out of his bedroom and is now wandering around the kitchen like a disoriented bear. "Advil?"

"Hospital," the bear says.

Moo turns back to the table.

"There was a rumor going that they were playing beer pong at 8:30 in the morning," he says.

"I think I heard it," Jana says, eating a bagel with jelly. She's astonishingly thin.

Moo's best friend, Brian Carline, 24, known as Construction Carline for his habit of donning a construction helmet when going dancing, is rooting through the freezer for breakfast food. He pulls out a bottle of Stoli Vanilla. "THERE'S NO WAY!" he shouts in his everyday, cranked-to-10 voice. He holds up the bottle, which is nearly empty, and looks accusingly toward the couches. "WHAT THE HELL WENT ON HERE?"

It's a rhetorical question. Carline starts knocking the ice off a box of Eggo waffles.

Breakfast may be one of the few quiet periods in the life of the guido, so it seems appropriate to take advantage of this lull to consider what "guido" means.

Consider the T-shirt Moo is wearing, which he designed and sells on NJGuido. (Clothing sales on the site net about $70 or $80 a month, which is enough for one guy's night of drinking at Temptations, if he's not buying too much.) On the front of the shirt is the site's logo: a bare-chested guy holding what looks like a fireball -- Moo calls this "the energy" -- above his head. On the back it says: I am a New Jersey guido. A well refined, clean cut, muscle toned, fist pumping, girlfriend stealing, machine. You got a problem with that?

Then, at the bottom: If a sexy guidette is reading this . . . how you doin?

One slang dictionary dates the emergence of the term guido to the late '80s. Back then, he wore baggy-legged Z. Cavaricci pants, tank tops and gold chains and drove a souped-up Mustang or Camaro IROC-Z. The guidette kabuki'd her hair into a massive nest guarded by an iron fence of bangs. In the '80s and '90s, the term guido was often derisive and directed at Italians, but the community was ethnically broader than that.

These were the people of northern New Jersey and Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Yonkers, a bridge-and-tunnel crowd bound together more by attitude than by ancestral homeland. They were the spiritual descendants of John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever" character, the dim but gorgeous Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint clerk who is truly alive only when he's strutting on the dance floor.

The guido ethos is showy, it bumps shoulders and yells. It is a hey-baby culture, in which the men are macho and the women wear spandex. When cruising in cars -- a popular pastime -- guidos like loud dance music and loud-looking girls. When they walk, they thrust their shoulders back and take over sidewalks.

But as evolution teaches, those who cannot adapt, die. Moo understands this, and he wants the world to know that today's guido is a modern, sophisticated creature -- that although the guido persists, his Z. Cavariccis do not. The old IROC-Z has been replaced by the BMW 330 as the ideal form of transportation. The guidette's hair is no longer big -- it is flat as an ironed skirt or limp and curly, like seaweed.

Moo, a computer consultant mostly for construction companies, didn't start the Web site with any grand ambitions. Originally, NJGuido was just a place he could post digital photos he'd taken of nights out with friends. The name was descriptive, because he knew what he was. He was a guido.

"I never had a problem being called that," says Moo, who lives in Franklin Lakes, N.J. "But then people were like, 'Why do you have a Web site called guido -- is that a joke?' "

The site's reputation seemed to spread by word-of-mouth, becoming popular not only with other guidos but also with people who liked to make fun of them. Moo didn't care. He got so much traffic, the message board he'd set up was crashing. He moved NJGuido to a bigger server. He put an "I H NJGUIDOS" thong up for sale and added a game called Bustout!, involving a girl in a bikini. He added banner ads for local nightclubs, which he says allow the site to break even. He says he now gets 11,000 to 13,000 visits a day.

"Now that everybody sees it, I figure, may as well try to turn it into something good," he says.

Over on the couches, the guys are making a fuss about a pop star on TV.

"That's Jewel!"

"I'm Jewel-ing right now!"

Perhaps these guys -- indeed, perhaps all of New Jersey -- have been waiting for a visionary like Moo. A proud man. A man with a poetic soul who can write an inspirational online piece like "NJ Anthem":

"This is the weekend that we show the rest of the world what we are made of . . . . We don't want to dress up, we want to dress less. We want to show off the fact that New Jersey men and women are in the best shape."

The anthem ends, as most of Moo's online entries do, with his motto: "There are no excuses. Party like a rockstar."

Seaside Before Dark

Waiting.

It's mid-afternoon on Sunday. The daylight hours are slow. It's too cold to go to the bikini bar on the beach the guys like to call the Silicone Club.

The music in the palace is almost always on and often extremely loud, so that a person can find the apartment -- which is down an alley, on the back side of the house -- just by following the thumping bass line. This contributes to a sense that Moo and his friends are perpetually pumping themselves up for a party, even when they're just sitting around.

In the kitchen, Moo is making burgers for everyone on a George Foreman grill. Construction Carline, who has been awake for just about four hours, makes an announcement to no one in particular

[absolutv]

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Guest saleen351]

Tempts....

its a family thing.....

CLASSICSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS NIGHT IS ONNNNNNNNNNN

BLACK SUNGLASSES

PUMAS

ADIDAS PANTS

AND A YANKEES T SHIRT...

AND WELL ROLL DOWN TO SEASIDE IN A SALEEN302 OR A ULTRA RARE SALEEN XP8.....

T MINUS 7 DAYS AND 4 HOURS.....

[Orisha]

I thouroughly enjoyed that, being Italian and all...LMAO!!

[Guest saleen351]

btw, where i'm from, if you are a hard core guido, you are called a "Benny"

it comes from the word "beneficial" its use for all the north nj and nyer crowd... bennys and locals don't get along...