trying to run FSF emacs in character based mode ( -nw ) on Catalina
I actually solved this before I posted but decided that it is worth documenting what I found out.

It turns out that /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs is a small ruby script that figures out which binary to run (there are three):

ls -l /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/
total 110296

-rwxr-xr-x@  1 rful011  admin      3408  2 Sep 19:19 Emacs
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 rful011  admin  18889792  2 Sep 19:19 Emacs-x86_64-10_10
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 rful011  admin  18690016  2 Sep 19:19 Emacs-x86_64-10_14
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 rful011  admin  18883904  2 Sep 19:19 Emacs-x86_64-10_9


and if I make my alias


  alias emacs='/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs-x86_64-10_14 -nw $1'


it works.