Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, at left, and his closest competitors

It was long before high noon, but the sun was blisteringly hot, the smell of cheap beer and vomit was already in the air, and I was watching Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis as he dove into a fifteen-foot-wide apple pie. I was back at Coney Island, awaiting my very first Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. The original competition at Nathan’s was supposedly held in 1916, but the annual spectacle as we know it today didn’t really take shape until the 1970s.

Spectacle is really the only way to describe it. Long ago, ESPN decided that hotdog eating alone does not a televised special make, so it is now embellished with trampoline artists, Brooklyn Cyclones cheerleaders, men in hot dog costumes, and pie-diving events while college-aged boys in sequined Uncle Sam hats and Captain America suits look on and yell obscenities at anyone Canadian. And Greg Louganis? Even if he was doing it to raise money for the ASPCA, I really didn’t want to see a sports star from my childhood reduced to wiping globs of caramel and nuts from his eyes. We live in a very strange nation, one in which eating food is not enough; rather it must be gorged upon…or dived into.

“Why are you here?” I asked a middle-aged man standing next to me. (The younger gentleman on the other side of me was too busy opening a can of Coors with his teeth to be bothered with my existential crisis.)

“It’s worth doing once,” he said cheerfully. “It’s like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Now I can say I’ve done it.”

The emcee looms above the crowd

That sounded like as good of a reason as any, so I resolved to cheer up. And it really was a banner year of hot dog eating. Joey “Jaws” Chestnut blew away the competition and tied his world record of a few years before with 68 hot dogs and buns in ten minutes. But it was the women’s contest that was the turning point in my mood.

The Black Widow, at peace

The women were all slender and rather pretty (albeit somewhat tough-looking, as if this wasn’t the first frat party they’d weathered). But it was tiny, forty-five-year-old Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, with her girlish swinging ponytail and boundless energy, who won my heart. Excitement built in my chest as she threw hot dogs down her throat at world record pace. “I’ve never seen her so at peace,” the emcee proclaimed, as Sonya bounced up and down with glee. When she reached number forty-five, smashing her previous world record by three entire dogs, the crowd went wild.

And so, in this roiling cauldron of America’s less admirable proclivities, perhaps there was a kernel of nobility. A person, through sheer force of will, pushing boundaries and attaining the near-impossible—isn’t that one of the ideals upon which this nation was founded? When Sonya Thomas leapt into the crowd, waving an American flag above her head, everyone, myself included, chanted her name.