You know.” ) And so Vinnie’s alter ego - the mysterious midnight dialer to whom he assigns his seldom-used full name - starts taking shape. “It just doesn’t fit the picture I have of you.” Asked to explain, she adds, “I guess.
Vinnie keeps up the phone calls but refuses to identify himself, telling her only that he has an Italian name. “If you need me to forgive you, it’s probably a sign that you’re neurotic.”
“I never heard of a creep who had this need to apologize,” Patsy says dismissively before hanging up. So he calls back to explain, on two separate nights, disguising his voice by draping a T-shirt over the receiver. But his biggest experiment in identity creation is “Vincenzo,” who functions as a kind of analog-era avatar, helping him get close to Patsy, the popular blonde next door.Īfter calling her one night and blurting an absurd proposition, Vinnie fears Patsy will think he’s an obscene caller. He stands up to - and gets knocked down by - a boorish football star. Slowly, and with much wheezing, he transforms himself into a cross-country runner.
“I couldn’t seem to recover from one blow before another followed,” he reflects. He has a litany of woes that read like the 10 plagues of young adulthood: Parental divorce. When “Not Exactly a Love Story” opens in 1977, Vinnie Gold, 15, is struggling to revise himself into something better. Mark Zuckerberg had not yet arrived on the planet, and teenagers didn’t obsessively fashion aspirational online identities.īut long before the advent of the digital age, adolescence was about trying on new personalities, about building - as much as being - someone, then presenting that self to the world. In the 1970s, most Americans still had rotary phones.
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