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I offer up no weak defense for my selfish behavior except to say that on one end I felt needed and wanted for once in my life, and on the other, it was a coward’s quick way out of a situation that was “logically progressing” with frightening speed: from the yellow lab puppy we bought the week we moved back from New York; to a house that we purchased simply because I was in the mortgage industry and for which I only had to cough up $100 of my own money; to a baby a year or two down the line that I was not yet prepared to have and wouldn’t ever be with my wife. (It’s no small irony, I feel, that my co-worker had been pregnant but had been in a car accident four months earlier, on April Fool’s Day, and suffered a miscarriage. If she had still been with child, would all of this have happened? But if not her, then…)

I watched American Wedding opening night, August 1, 2003, with this woman at the Regal Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13 out in Hillsboro, and remember next to nothing about the film as we were in the back row holding hands and making out and staring into each other’s eyes with the kind of feverish intensity usually reserved for liberal arts undergrads debating philosophy and drinking espresso into the dark hours of the night. After which we should have said our goodnights and gone our separate ways for the evening. After which instead we went back to her house and had sex. After which her husband showed up. And a week later, this information made it back to my wife, via a midnight phone call from the husband. The affair, which had lasted all of four weeks at that point, was already in its death throes, although it would drag on, in an increasingly self-destructive fashion and in a fairly unrecognizable form, for another six months.

All of which taken together offers a fitting valediction at the three-year mark for a column about - and its ruminations on a life lived in thrall to - first sequels and second chances. For here, to prove the oft-right F. Scott Fitzgerald just a little wrong, there are nothing but second acts. And in the case of this week’s installment, there is a second slice of American Pie.

Sometimes my deep thoughts strike me as particularly profound, whereas other times, no wishing in the world can accord them the meaning I would bestow on them, and they wind up like Jack Handey rejects unfit to fill even a subpar SNL interstitial. You are to be treated to one of the latter this time around. While watching American Pie 2, the following occurred to me: why is it so difficult to make an enjoyable sequel when you have brought back all of the characters, portrayed by all of the same actors who originated them, and you don’t create any fake drama (er, comedy) by having the characters behave in ways antithetical to their nature.

There is something to be said for the element of surprise no longer being there, but that’s not what proves troublesome to me. In the space of only 90 minutes (minus credits), the first American Pie movie finds something for all of its characters to do. They all feel crucial to the plot, all are given a memorable moment (or moments) to shine and the film hums along almost as a series of comic vignettes, strung together with little pretense for continuity or anything but the vague outlines of a plot. Watching it again this last week, I laughed and felt uncomfortable in all the right spots, but I also felt an unexpected warm glow - not simply for the nostalgia of watching and remembering a time 13 years ago, but because of my aforementioned affection for these fictional creations. And this exists, in large part because of screenwriter Adam Herz’s obvious affection for them. It is rare to find a mainstream American film - much less a sex comedy - that has such warmth and fondness for its characters.

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