Plastic Fantasic [john calendo] nightcharm.com

Dance those jeans around, Gap Boy! No wonder Jackie Susann called TV "The Love Machine." In the debut of his new column, John Caliendo flips through the commercials and finds Sex is Being Served in a Bun of Pop Culture. Dude, You're Getting a Dick!

Right now he’s That Boy From the Gap Ad, the one with the slept-on hair and scruffy weekend beard who dances his mess around in a television spot that is driving you, me and the 12-year-old down the hall crazy.

Actually, the 12-year-old who lives down my hall happens to be the Oracle of Delphi. Her predictions on pop culture in general -- and boy bands in particular -- are heart-stopping. Cassy (or Cassandra as I prefer to call her) has already taken me to a computer and keyed in the words "Will Kemp," which it turns out is That Boy’s name this month. We cross state lines and enter a stunning website, so nuanced with biographical arcana that I wonder aloud how so much could have been amassed on someone who, up until a few blinks ago, was -- like -- a nobody.

Here I learn that Will Kemp is a 25-year-old Brit Ballet dancer who found that the director at the Gap shoot didn't know what he wanted. "So I just got my rocks off and jumped around a bit."

Here, in fact, I learn many things: Did you know that Will’s parents encouraged him to dance because he stuttered or that his favorite movie is Billy Elliot ("At the end I was raw," he confides touchingly) or that he was dubbed the "James Dean of Ballet" by Sherry Lansing when the Paramount chief saw him in the all-male, homo-hot

version of Swan Lake (Will played The Swan and ended up in bed with The Prince)?

In the Gap ad that inspired, so far, three Will Kemp fansites, he is seen slip-sliding his very sweet moneymaker to the sounds of a chorus that asks what makes you do stuff like that. Well, let me tell you: Speaking for past and future That Boys everywhere, it's called Movie Contracts, People Covers, and All the Bling-Bling You Can Wrap Your Face Around.

And, gee, wouldn’t you know it, Will is set to debut next April in a high-end thriller, Mindhunters, in which he is -- let's see now -- part of an elite FBI team (is there another kind?) being picked off by a killer during weekend exercises on a secluded island.

Let’s hope he makes it past the first reel, if only for the sake of the busy Will_Kemp Yahoo Group, 200 members strong, most of them girls, all converts of the Gap Ad, who post messages back and forth wondering, among other things, if Will is gay. ("With my luck..." begins sarasantos77 pessimistically.)

Someone is quick to post the fatal news. Will is not gay but dammit, he has a girlfriend! Everyone is devastated, and a blizzard of posts follow. Safaris are arranged to hunt down the facts on the net. Someone bags the prize; their rival is a singer-songwriter. One and all dismiss her as a "a guitar-playing hippie chick!" In no time, the girls are consoling each other with the wonderful news that Will has been signed for a second film, Van Helsing, opposite, in the words of one poster, "omygod! Hugh Jackson." Can one heart stand it?

Not since "Steven," the rascally SpokesDude for Dell Computer, has 30 seconds made so many people’s day. Even so, "Steven" (real name: Ben Curtis, a 23-year-old Acting student at NYU) remains America’s favorite That Boy.

In 16 commercials, starting in 2000, when he first conned Mom & Dad into a high-end Dell by stressing its "free" features ("And Dad," he said with a sage stroke of the chin, "I know how you love free stuff"), Curtis plays an Eddie Haskell update -- all cheesy civility to the parents but a real operator with the guys.

By the end of his rookie year, the "Dude, You’re Getting a Dell" campaign had doubled the company’s share of the home PC market, and "Steven" was both corporate logo and a pop phenom with umpteen fansites like the fanatic BenCurtisRocks, which gets 1000 hits a day.

Perhaps because he’s always pitching his Dells to Dudes, his huge fanbase is also hugely gay. On the 15 Yahoo Groups dedicated to dellstevelovers and thecutedellguy, teenage boys either equal or overwhelm the girls. And the boys gush. The boys post fantasies of meeting The Steven and dating The Steven, There is much optomistic speculation over possible "bisexuality" and polls are created to measure how many fans would prefer to see him in bicycle pants or chaps. ("Nothing but a smile" wins the day at DudeBenCurtisIsHot with a solid 53% majority.)

And gee wouldn’t you know it, The Steve-ster is set to star in his first movie, Dumb and Dumber 2: The Teenage Years, due for a summer 2003 release.

I look over to Cassandra, confused. How can there be two different That Boys at the same time!

But she's so way ahead of the curve, she just clicks the back arrow on the browser. "Steven," poor overexposed "Steven," is yesterday. It's all about Will today.

John Calendo is a frequent contributor to Nightcharm and our new Pop Critic @ Large. His work has appeared in Playboy, Blueboy and boy oh boyeverything in between.