A definitely out of it Anna Nicole Smith crashes a Beverly Hills bar mitzvah and dirty dances with the bar mitzvah boy. Although it sounds like the setup to a joke (“In the old days we used to get a fountain pen …”), the boy’s family says it actually happened. But Smith’s camp says otherwise. So which is it?

On the evening of January 31, according to Iann Weiss, the mother of thirteen-year-old Evan Weiss, a “totally spacey” Smith appeared in the women’s restroom in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she chatted up a few young bar mitzvah guests. When they returned to the Rodeo Room, where the affair was being held, Smith followed them—and when she saw Evan dancing, she sidled up to him. “I didn’t recognize her,” Iann says. “You know, she’s lost all that weight.” Evan didn’t know who she was either. “My son is very much into girls, but he prefers Pamela Anderson,” Iann says. At first everyone at the party was amused (“By that time, we were feeling no pain, if you know what I mean”), but eventually Evan walked away because, he says, Smith asked him to “touch me, touch me all over.” “My husband, Bob, said, ‘In a couple of years, you’re going to be sorry you got off the dance floor,” recalls Iann, who alleges that within a few minutes, Smith’s boyfriend and three pals muscled their way into the room, pulled Smith by her hair, and dragged her out—but not before she tripped over a chair. It was an odd end to an odd night, though Evan kept his sense of humor. “He thinks he had the best bar mitzvah of all,” Iann says with a laugh.

Yet Smith’s New York publicist, David Granoff, isn’t laughing: He says the Weiss family invited her to the bar mitzvah reception when they discovered she was eating dinner at the hotel. “The father beseeched her to come in,” he gripes. “This whole thing was planned from the beginning to get the kid’s name in the paper.” Contrary to the picture being painted of Smith as a boozy floozy, Granoff says the Mexia-ex—whom he terms “a dream client”—is a “kind, compassionate person” with “a lot more ethics than most people.” If she danced suggestively with a thirteen-year-old, so be it. “The girl is not a nun,” he says. “When she dances, she’s a sexy gal.” And what about her tripping? “I don’t know whether she fell or not.”

What’s the truth? Was Smith the victim of a publicity stunt or was this just another bizarre act by a woman whose recent history seems to be littered with them? For what it’s worth, Smith’s former manager, Joyce Wagner, thinks it’s the latter. A veteran entertainment journalist who handled Smith from October 1996 to March 1997, Wagner cites other instances of misbehavior, including a blown soft-drink commercial. In February of last year Smith was to receive $410,000 for two days’ work on a European TV ad for Dr Pepper; the only hitch was that she had to stay out of the tabloids. But she apparently couldn’t help herself. After granting a paid interview to London’s Sun that ran under the headline Thincredible Hulk, the deal fell apart.

“There was nothing she could do about what went on before,” Wagner notes, referring to Smith’s wild days in Texas. “L.A. was going to be a fresh start. But to be doing a seductive dance with a thirteen-year-old boy? That makes her untouchable. She really shot herself in both of her tattooed ankles.”