Alison Pugh

Yeah, so my father was busy at work, and my mother was kind of in charge of figuring out what schools the kids would go to, and she solved the problem for my oldest brother, and he was, I think, 14, and then my sister, then my brother, then my sister, and then...

You know, I think somewhere around August, she looks down and she sees me and was like, wait a minute, I don't have a place for you to go.

So, you know, I think she, you know, made some last minute arrangement that got me into a preschool.

My familial background involves, I have, you know, some Irish in me, and a big portion of my identity is Italian.

And

my family has recipes for lasagna and red sauce and calamari and stuffed peppers.

I am an Italian raised cook.

And so when I was about 24, 25, I was in Honduras as a foreign service officer.

In Honduras, they have

The garlic they sell is unusually small.

The cloves are really tiny.

And I remember my ambassador kind of joking about how hard it was to cook with these tiny little.

And then he's looking at me.

He goes, what do you know?

Why am I talking to you about this?

You're just some wasp.

You don't know anything about garlic.

And I was just taken aback by the misread.

He had no idea.

I might look like a wasp on the outside.