Portland, Ore. ? Author Marc Acito can spot them a city block away, the real-life counterparts to the drama geeks that 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, something snappy.

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 thrown in.

“I don’t know why high school is right under the surface for me,” says Acito, a trim, dark-haired hipster who sports a porkpie hat during an interview at a local Borders Books.

“For the book, I called old friends and asked them to reminisce. I remembered more than anyone else,” says Acito, who has lived in a Portland neighborhood far enough from downtown to have no sidewalks for 14 years with his partner, writer Floyd Sklaver.

The book isn’t a memoir of Acito’s New Jersey high school hijinks, 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 cryptic, leggy former cheerleader, a nebbishy neighbor who is the real brains of the operation and a matinee idol jock named Doug who becomes the object of Edward’s unrequited affection.

There’s also the obligatory high school production of “Grease,” 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.

Not first brush with fame

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.”

Judging from the e-mails he’s received, the audience for his book looks to be what he calls the “Will and Grace” demographic — gay men and the women who love them — as well as past and present members of high school theater clubs.

The book isn’t Acito’s first brush with fame. Acito and Sklaver were among the first gay Americans to be married on the grounds of the Canadian Parliament building in Victoria. The ceremony was broadcast coast-to-coast on Canadian television, and was attended by British Columbia’s Solicitor General who happened to be passing by during the vows.

Good reviews

Since its publication, Acito’s novel has been well-received by critics, including one from The New York Times, who said, “Acito’s characters are a self-consciously eccentric crew, but their haphazard friendships and over-the-top scheming are thoroughly believable. The ease with which Acito has choreographed their crazy capers makes you hope there’s lots more where all this came from.”

Gerry Howard, Acito’s editor at Broadway Books, not only bought Acito’s first book but locked in the right of first refusal on his next one.

“I just liked everything about the book from the first sentence and paragraph,” Howard said. “It’s very, very hard to write a book that is as witty and on the one hand as artificial, and on the other hand anchored in reality, as Marc has achieved.”

Howard said the book so far has sold, “north of 20,000 copies” and that Broadway has gone back for a second printing; editors are also expecting the book to sell even better in paperback, he said.