Lake Ronkonkoma Couple Featured on Marriage Ref

Mario and Debbie D'Amore are like any other couple that has been married for 37 years on Long Island, except they were recently featured on a nationally televised show about fun marriage disputes.

If you happened to catch NBC's new show the "Marriage Ref," two episodes ago, you would have been startled to hear host Tom Papa say, "Let's let ourselves out into the shimmering shores of Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y."

The show has a panel of three different celebrity judges –Matthew Broderick, Martin Short and Sarah Silverman in this case – who help Papa make a ruling on a marital issue, which is always lighthearted and entertaining. For the D'Amore's, their battle line was drawn in the war of decaf coffee and whether or now Debbie should ask for a fresh pot when they go out.

She says the milk will rotate a certain way if the pot is old.

"You want me to drink from that 3 o'clock pot," she said to the waitress at B.L.D's in Lake Ronkonkoma, "its 4:30."

Her gripe with Mario is the excessive time he spends in the bathroom.

"It's the hair," he said on the show. "You look good, you feel good."

Broderick agreed with Debbie on the coffee issue and said Mario should take as long as he wants.

"She should be happy he's gone for a few hours," he said.

"He's a handsome guy," Debbie said a week later. "You think it's easy being married to a pretty boy? It's not easy. He's in there clipping, cutting, moisturizing. You don't even want to touch him when he's done."

Short said Mario, a banker, is spending too much time primping and priming himself and a buxom Silverman said Debbie should ask more nicely about fresh cups of coffee if they're out at a restaurant.

Papa made the final call.

"Just order the coffee and drink it," he said. "Mario you win that one. Two hours in the bathroom? The entire cast of Avatar got ready in an hour. If you're not coming out of there blue and 15 feet tall, you're taking too much time. You're a man. Forty-five minutes and that's it. Debbie you win that one."

The tiebreaker came down to Mario's interest in country line dancing. While the show portrayed the situation as Debbie not wanting him to take part in the activity, that's not the case. She said the real problem was that Mario didn't want her, "to meet his new secret friends," she said.

"If it makes him happy, I'm fine with that," she said. "This is what he loves. I'm happy for him if that's what he found. It's the secret friends. Every man woman or child in America would never agree to that."

Mario twirled in the kitchen with his cowboy boots and Papa and Short immediately rose and danced on stage.

"What he did on the screen is outlawed in seven states," Short joked.

"Country line dancing," Papa said. "What country is that? Brazil during Carnival in 1968?"

Broderick was all for it since he's been dancing for years and winning Tony Awards for his moves. Silverman was equally as accepting.

"I think he should let his freak flag fly," she said.

Mario won that bout and two of three battles.

"It's fun. It's very big," Mario said. "Some of my friends tell me to get a life. That's because they don't know how to do it and I feel so sorry for them."

As the show aired live, the D'Amore's watched with friends and family at Vincenzo's in Islip Terrace.

Debbie, a local realtor, was flipping through Backstage Magazine, a trade publications for actors and actresses – they're into theater – and stumbled upon an advertisement for the show.

She sent a link of one of the many YouTube videos she has shot about her life – this one particularly about the decaf coffee extravaganza.

"They said this is hilarious," said Debbie, "and why are you locked up in Lake Ronkonkoma and no one knows who you are?"

Within days NBC had a camera crew at their Lake Ronkonkoma home, where they've lived since 1979. They were filmed at B.L.Ds, Radio Shack and Waldbaum's. In total it was about eight months from the time they were first filmed to the time it aired April 29.

They have an NBC Radio tour this week where they'll be featured on more than 12 markets and someone recently started a Facebook group persuading someone to give Mario and Debbie, who won a second honeymoon through Royal Caribbean International for being on the Marriage Ref, their own show.

They could pull it off.