Meet Steve Dingley, Philly's own love guru

You can forget VH1's

The Pick Up Artist

, with its fuzzy-hatted host Mystery and his scary bedroom eyes.

You can burn your copies of Neil Strauss' cheeky and lurid book The Game.

You may even be able to hold off seeing a shaggy Mike Myers play that Deepak Chopra wannabe in The Love Guru, at least until it's out on DVD.

Philadelphia has its own love guru, Stephen Dingley, a man who specializes in teaching people how to warm to the ways of l'amour without seeming like a creep.

From the posters on telephone polls and kiosks, Dingley, 22, comes on as Shag-a-delic as one of Myers' characters. The text reads:

Steve Dingley - The Romance Coach

Have trouble with women?

You are in luck - Steve Dingley is offering his tips for dating beautiful women.

Learn everything to do with dating:

how to pick-up girls

how to score

etiquette and grooming tips

I can show you how to become the man you've always dreamed of. Seminars and private sessions available. Contact me below for more information.

With that are tabs featuring the phone number and e-mail address for the 6-foot-1 West Philly native, waiter at the Continental, and biology student at the University of Pennsylvania who spends his days doing bio-chem research at Children's Hospital.

You also get to see that the dark-haired Dingley, a former lifeguard, isn't afraid to don a Speedo to sell himself.

"I think it spreads my word-of-mouth cause quicker than it might have otherwise," Dingley says, laughing, when the poster is mentioned. "And wearing the Speedo shows I have nothing to hide."

Having nothing to hide doesn't mean Dingley did this on purpose.

The story goes that college friends of Dingley - a ladies' man of sorts - made up the poster in September while he was studying for his MCAT exam. But what started out as a joke on him got serious when Dingley received phone calls from fellow Penn students who weren't kidding about their need to develop social skills.

"Rolling with a new crowd made me a little uncomfortable," says Eric Morris, a 19-year-old student at the Wharton School. Morris, who is 5-foot-9 with curly brown hair, was a confident high school student in Boston, but when he came to Philly he found it hard to get to know people, women in particular. So along with working out to get in shape for his sophomore year, he answered Dingley's ad in October and became "The Love Doctor's" first student.

"Seriously, when I saw that poster, my pals back home thought it was a joke," Morris says. "But I had nothing to lose."

Neither did Dingley.

He'd been good with people since kindergarten. Had good relationships with girlfriends, steady ones and short involvements, and believed that his brand of confident conversational largesse, swagger and sartorial and tonsorial style could be taught.

"I just wanted to help these guys meet girls, make them more appealing," Dingley says. "Not by necessarily changing who they are, but helping to accent their positive characteristics. A lot of the guys I come in contact with are the real academic type. They've got a lot going for them, but when it comes to interacting with girls it just doesn't go well at all."

Dingley also encourages his students to push the less attractive attributes (Morris' Thursday night Dungeons and Dragons session) into the background.

There was and is no classroom for Dingley. Instead, his students (a dozen so far) think of him as a brotherly sort and his schooling as a brand of experiential learning where each $40 session occurs at a restaurant, a bar or a fraternity party.

Morris' first time happened at Cavanaugh's, during lunch.

"I had him go up to girls and start conversations while I stood to the side, listened, and then gave him tips after. Then I decided to have him go up to a girl I'm friends with and flirt. He wound up hanging out with the girl the rest of the night. That's how I knew it would work."

Adam Rapport, 22, a Penn graduate in the Wharton School's real estate/finance department, had his first session at Smokey Joe's. The Minnesota native had never had problems meeting women. "I had lots of girl friends but no girlfriends," says the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Rapport.

He and Morris say Dingley doesn't really teach. "He just figures out what your best qualities are and finds a way for you to lead with those and enhance yourself around them," Morris says.

"That's the whole point of what I do," Dingley says. "You've seen that VH1 show with Mystery - such a total tool - that focuses on changing guys. I focus on accenting the positive characteristics they already have going for them. One student, Adam, was a bit on the heavy side but had a great sense of humor. I helped him become comfortable enough around girls to really bring that out."

Rapport, who also went with Dingley to Cuba Libre and Plough & the Stars, has a girlfriend.

"I knew all along what to do but he pushed me in the right direction," says Rapport, who just moved to New York. "I learned by being close to him, working off him like I would a pal or a big brother. Strange, as we're the same age, but his experience seems years older and wiser."

"Even if I didn't learn - which I did - he always bought me dinner," says Morris who, after three months of weekly lessons, still attends Dingley's "class" twice a month. "Steve's definitely Philly's own love guru."

As for Dingley himself . . . he doesn't have a girlfriend, and hasn't yet attracted any female students. "But I'm looking," he says.