Paul Stroili's one-man show "Straight Up with a Twist", which opened Friday night at the Crossroads Theater in Naperville, is a very funny show about a man who is too sensitive for his own good - Paul Stroili.

Stroili freely admits he knows too much about thread counts and color combinations, cares too much about fashion, and worries way, way too much about the best ways to make a bed or a meal.

He jokes that he's the kind of guy who tells people, "Don't call my house during 'Monday Night Football.' That's when I vacuum."

Now people who are quick to stereotype may have already pegged Stroili as homosexual, but, as he tells us repeatedly over the course of this 90-minute show, he likes girls.

He's married to a woman who loves him, in part, because he's "like this great gay friend I get to have sex with." He is very much a straight guy with a queer eye.

How Stroili got this way is the subject of this hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, show. It wasn't easy. Stroili had a very long ugly duckling phase, when the lanky, lean kid (already more than 6 feet tall in the sixth grade) stood out like a sunflower among weeds.

Stroili gets lots of laughs putting himself down, telling us he was so unathletic as a boy he had to practice for hours "just to throw like a girl."

He earns another big laugh describing his father's disappointment at having such an unmanly son. He quotes his father: "I guess (sigh) I wanted a son who was a boy."

These jokes are funny, in a stand-up kind of way, but what makes this show special is how much heart Stroili brings to the material.

His heart shows itself in the moving portraits he creates of his family - his chain-smoking mother, his dumbfounded father, his loud-mouthed brother - and of the ways they reacted to Stroili as he grew up. And his heart shows itself in how relaxed and open he is on stage.

Of course, Stroili is a trained actor who paid his dues in Chicago in the early 90's before moving on to Los Angeles. And any actor worth his salt can fake a degree of open-heartedness.

But it takes more than mere acting technique to win over an audience as quickly and completely as Stroili does - it takes a little bit of soul.