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“I’d give this wedding an eight out of ten,” pronounced Griffin. “And I don’t give tens.”

“It’s got all the ostentation of a Staten Island Italian wedding, with none of the signs of bad taste,” David agreed.

“Yeah, I’ve got to give Kyle some props,” Smiley said. “And the new Mrs. Ahern. The food is tremendous. Tremendous!”

            “But nobody’s dancing,” I said. “Doesn’t anybody dance at weddings any more?”

            “All the weddings I go to, everybody’s wife and girlfriend go on the dance floor and grind against each other as the guys sit like mummies at the tables, not eating their salads, and staring off into the middle distance,” Griffin said. “But that’s just the weddings I go to.”

            “We can dance, Marc,” Stacey suggested.

            “But nobody else is up there.”

            “That didn’t stop you from dancing with me at Mary’s wedding.”

            “You got a point. Let’s go.”

            The DJ had been playing “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez, which left the crowd of friends and relatives at the 200-plus guest wedding reception unmoved, but which made me excited to dance. Suddenly, however, the music switched over to a tango.

            “Uh-oh,” I said. “I have no idea how to tango.”

            “Me neither,” Stacey replied. “Let’s fake it.”

            We put our right arms around one another’s waist, clasped our left hands together and marched three steps to the left, following the lead of our outstretched arms. Then we abruptly halted. 

I snapped my head around to the right. 

I snapped my head around to the left.

I snapped my head around to the right. 

We swapped the positions of our arms, and marched three steps to the right.

I snapped my head around to the right. 

I snapped my head around to the left.

I snapped my head around to the right.

We tried to swap the positions of our arms again, but we were laughing too hard. 

“Yeah!” Smiley yelled from our table, pumping his fist in the air. “Go, DiPaolo! Go!”

Then we began to construct the oddest dance routine that anyone in the room had ever seen. We mixed the tango, the twist, and some half-assed swing dancing, and threw in a few break dancing moves for good measure. I added elements of John Travolta’s dance routine from Saturday Night Fever, Jimmy Stewart’s moves from It’s a Wonderful Life, and Art Carney’s pseudo-ballet moves from The Honeymooners. Stacey was doing her own thing, which seemed to be a 50’s style kind of dance that I didn’t know how to copy. I moon-walked.  Stacey moon-walked. Then I dropped to the ground, rolled onto my side, and kicked myself around in a circle, going faster and faster and faster, scuffing the floor with my dress shoes as I spun. I sensed a crowd of onlookers had rose to their feet to watch me spin in place, so I kept spinning for as long and as fast as I could.

When I had made myself so dizzy I was about to throw up, I stopped and staggered to my feet.

“That’s the craziest god damn thing I’ve ever seen!” Smiley roared. “Great stuff, DiPaolo! Great stuff!”

David pointed to the floor, where I had just been spinning. “Look at that! He’s painting a black circle of shoe scuff marks on the dance floor!”

Suddenly, the DJ was playing the techno classic “James Brown is Dead” and there were a good fifty people on the dance floor, cutting a rug.

“Good job,” David said. He started doing a dance he learned at the ska clubs out in L.A. that seemed pretty cool.

“I don’t usually dance, but I’ll make an exception,” Griffin intoned. Then he started improvising something subtle, and almost subdued, but in time with the music and pretty good.

“Stacey!” Smiley shouted over the din of the music as we all danced. “I like the effect you’ve had on Marc! He’s a lot more mature! A lot more self-possessed. You improved him a lot this past year or so.”

“Oh, he was great when I found him!” she yelled back. “The world’s greatest catch just swimming around out in the open! I can’t believe some other girl hadn’t reeled him in before me. I’m so lucky!”

“Well, Marc, you may not believe this, but I always admired and respected you. I just felt you needed bringing out. A spring in your step. A confident look in your eye. You used to flinch every time you met someone knew, as if you expected them to cold-cock you if you let your guard down. Now you’re all grown up!”

“You may even be ready to run for office! You’d be a great candidate! You’re so damn smart.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m a writer. Between my autobiographical stories and my newspaper articles, the Republicans could easily take something I wrote out of context and make me look like a monster. They’d destroy me overnight.”

Smiley looked at David. “You hear that? He said ‘The Republicans!’ He’s fantasized about running, and he’s imagined himself a Democrat!”

“George W. Bush did it to him,” Stacey explained. “Drove Marc over to our side with his incompetence and evil policies.”

“Yeah, the country would have been so much better off if Gore had won,” I called over the music.

“He did win!” Smiley yelled. “Or have you forgotten?”

“Hey, Smiley,” David called, “Remember a few years back, at Belmar, when Marc was yelling at God and demanding a woman?”

“Who could forget it?” Smiley laughed. “’Fuck you, God! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!’ That was priceless.”

“What are they talking about?” Stacey asked me.

“I have no idea,” I said. “They’re raving. The strobe lights are getting to them. They’ll be having an epileptic fit in a minute.”

“You mean you don’t remember Belmar?” David asked.

“No! I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I called.

“Well, Stacey, it’s about time somebody cool dated Marc,” Smiley declared. “His other relationships were so short I never met any of his other girls! If there were any!”  

Griffin laughed, “Speaking of which, have any of you guys seen a great new movie that’s just come out? The 40-Year-Old Virgin? Also known as - ”

Then he and Smiley said in unison, “- The Marc DiPaolo Story!!!!!!”

I blushed and Stacey laughed hard. “We’ve seen it!” she laughed.

Here we essentially stopped dancing because we were all excited to talk about the film, so we stood on the edge of the dance floor, bobbing about a little in time with the music, with our feet planted on the floor. The new techno song of choice was “Injected with Poison!”

“Let me ask you, Stacey, if they changed the title to the 25-Year-Old Virgin, would that movie basically be the story of your courtship, or what?”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” David said. “What’s it like?”

I clear my throat and offer my summary. “A comic book nerd is single for about a thousand years, his friends keep taking him to bars to get him sex, but it’s always a disaster because the bar scene isn’t for him. Then he meets a great, sweet woman on his own. But then he has to give up all his comic book merchandise and mature emotionally so he can be a real adult and get married.”

“So why does that plot remind Griffin and Smiley of you, Marc?” David joked.

“Well, he’s more like the Steve Carrell character than I’m like the Catherine Keener character,” Stacey corrected.

“But it is basically a true story, right?” Smiley demanded.

“Somewhat,” Griffin said. “Marc is definitely cooler than that character Steve Carrell plays. But Carrell could play Marc in a movie about Marc. For sure.”

“And that chick from The Craft can play Stacey,” David said. “Robin Tunney.”

Stacey shook her head. “Oh, no. Not you, too. That’s who Marc says I look like.”

“I would rather I was played by Ellen DeGeneris or Jodi Foster,” Stacey replied.

“Is Steve Carrell young and chubby enough to play you, Marc?” asked David. “Maybe Oliver Platt would be better.”

“Oh, come on! You’re not casting me on the basis of my weight are you?” 

“You are a bit plump, you know. One can hardly not notice.”

“Why not cast me on the basis of my being Italian? Or being ‘professorial’? Real life people are always played by actors who are more attractive than them in movies. Tom Hanks and Russell Crowe have both played a bunch of guys in ‘Based on a true story’ movies that are uglier than them in real life.”

“You thought he’d be happy with Oliver Platt?”

“How about Simon Pegg?” David asked. “All he needs to do is dye his hair and assume a New York accent and he’s you.  And he’s not fat.”

“What about the rest of us?” David asked.

“You’re Edward Norton, Griffin is Paul Bettany, and Smiley is Seth Rogen,” I said.

“Not that he’s put any thought into this,” Smiley laughed.

“You’re giving me Oliver Platt now?” Smiley cried.

“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “Nobody here wants Oliver Platt to play them in a movie.”

Stacey looked bewildered. “I have no idea who any of these actors are. You guys much watch a lot of movies.”

“I have cable,” David said simply. “You wind up seeing a lot with the TV in the background when you live alone.

“Marc disabled his TV,” Griffin said, “So he buys DVDs to see movies.”

“When you buy movies, there’s no commercials, no TV station logos, you don’t wander in on the middle of a film and dismiss it out of hand as looking like crap,” I explain. “And not even cable TV shows enough black-and-white and foreign movies. You need DVDs to see actual good films. And you can’t rent them from Blockbuster Video. It doesn’t stock actually good films, just fifty copies of every single awful recent-release and one copy each of a million straight-to-video movies about sharks and vampires starring Shannon Tweed, Michael Dudikoff, and Casper Van Dien.”

“How much money did that cost?” Smiley asked.

“Most DVDs are $9, $14, or $24,” I explain. “But all the good ones are Criterion Collection and those are $32, usually. They’re a bit steep for me, so I ask for them on my birthdays and at Christmas.”

“You can sell all your movies and pay for a house for us,” Stacey suggested.

“Or I can keep them and we can live in a rented apartment,” I countered.

“Don’t make him choose between you and his movies,” Griffin warned Stacey.

“You don’t think I know that?” Stacey called back.

“I can’t keep up this conversation and dance this long,” Smiley said suddenly. “I have to sit down or I’ll collapse.”

But there were two dozen other people who stayed on the dance floor, and they partied until midnight.

Two years later, I returned from Photoshop training to my Kutztown, Pennsylvania, apartment and showed Stacey a printout of a collage I had made of publicity photos I’d found on the internet.

“Look!” I proclaimed. “I made a fake movie poster. What if they made a movie about me? I’m Mark Ruffalo. ‘The DiPaolos: The Movie.’ You don’t like Robin Tunney, so I got Amy Adams to play you. My brother is the dude from Brick, my mom is Polly Walker, and my dad is Nicholas Cage.”

“All those actors are in the same age range.”

“Well, Nicholas Cage and Polly Walker will dominate the first half of the film, and the actors playing us will take over in the second half. A bit like Godfather II, only it will be a movie about Italians with no gangsters in it.”

“I e-mailed it to the guys and fooled Griffin. He thought that a movie was really coming out called The DiPaolos and was surprised at how similar the characters looked to you and me. So I fooled him!”

“I thought so,” I smiled. “When he saw this poster, Smiley called me an ego-maniac, but I told him I couldn’t help it. I’m a Leo, after all. And Leo’s love the spotlight.”