‘How I Paid for College’ pays off

PORTLAND, Ore. —  Author Marc Acito can spot them a city block away, the real-life counterparts to the drama geeks who populate his fizzy first novel, a coming-of-age caper set in deepest suburbia.

He knows that 17-year-old boy who thinks nothing of wearing a cape in public, or the girl in the fishnet stockings humming “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” as she glides down the street, imagining herself under some bright lights, in a big city.

After all, the 38-year-old Acito is still a card-carrying member of that tribe known as “play people.” He’s even the butt of a family joke: When he opens the refrigerator door and the light goes on, he can’t resist doing a quick song and dance.

His new book, “How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater,” is a love letter to his own high school rat pack, with some serious creative license taken.

“I don’t know why high school is right under the surface for me,” says Acito, a trim, dark-haired hipster who has lived in Portland for 14 years with his partner, writer Floyd Sklaver. “For the book, I called old friends and asked them to reminisce. I remembered more than anyone else.”

The book isn’t a memoir of Acito’s New Jersey high school high jinks, however. For starters, his father, an insurance agent and trombonist, would like everyone to know that he gladly paid for Acito’s education at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. That’s quite unlike Al Zanni, the Tony Soprano father figure in “How I Paid for College,” who refuses to pay for his son, Edward, a wannabe actor, to study at the Juilliard School in New York.

Al’s pronouncement sends Edward and his group of misfit friends into a life of increasingly madcap crime, as they try to amass the $40,000 needed to pay for four years at Juilliard during the Reagan years. There’s a job at a particularly vile mall food-stand called Chicken Licken, underage excursions to gay piano bars in Greenwich Village, a cameo appearance by Frank Sinatra and various forms of teenage sexual experimentation.

If it sounds like a movie, it’s already on its way to becoming one. Eleven months before its release by Broadway Books, the novel was optioned by Columbia Pictures.

“They promised me that the movie will keep the early ‘80s era, that they’ll keep the bisexuality and that they will keep the musicals,” Acito says. “As for the cast, we need kids who can sing, dance and act -- so we probably don’t even know who they are yet.”

The book isn’t Acito’s first brush with fame. He and Sklaver were among the first gay Americans to be married on the grounds of the Parliament Building in Victoria, Canada. The ceremony was broadcast coast-to-coast on Canadian television.

Acito was kicked out of Carnegie Mellon’s theater program because of “artistic differences.”

“I thought I had talent and they didn’t think so,” he says.

From there, he bounced around, falling in love at the age of 20 with Sklaver and landing at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Colo. There, he finished his degree and launched himself on a middling career as an opera singer. He found some success with character opera roles, playing “drunks, hunchbacks and sidekicks,” but on the eve of his European premiere, holed up in a drafty rental flat in Dublin, Ireland, Acito said he realized that his work on the stage had become just a job.

And so after Dublin, Acito headed for Portland, where he and Sklaver became small-business owners, opening up a Fast Signs franchise. Between sales calls, Acito found time to write, sometimes pausing at stoplights to scribble down thoughts.

Acito is planning a sequel, which he’s tentatively calling “Attack of the Theater People.” But now he’s at work on a novel set in Portland about Christmas burnout and the pressure on women to create magical holidays.