HOLLYWOOD -- Here are a few pointers from Drew Barrymore. The pointers concern the latest, and grooviest, sign language from high school hipsters.

Barrymore is in the centre of a Beverly Hills Hotel room for her impromptu lesson.

"This," she says making finger-plucking gestures as though she's playing a bass guitar, "means it rocks.

"This," she says pretending to play a smaller bass guitar, "sort of rocks."

"And this," she says doing a Peter Townshend guitar windmill, "really rocks."

Lesson complete, Barrymore grins demurely and returns to her chair. "They say all actors want to be rock stars, and all rock stars want to be actors."

In a variation on the theme, Barrymore worked as an actress and lived life like a rock star after some serious, and well-documented, bouts of alcohol and drug abuse.

The scariest thing about her 14 years of excess is that Barrymore just turned 24.

But she's also turned her life around. She has been clean and sober the last few years.

Now, she has a career to match her new lease on living.

She earned raves as a kind-hearted waitress in The Wedding Singer last winter. She was acclaimed as a medieval Cinderella in Ever After this summer.

By all reports, her role as the goofy fast food employee in Home Fries will make the third time a charm in '98.

Opening Friday, the film has Barrymore playing a pregnant smalltown girl having an affair with an older man.

When the wife (Catherine O'Hara) finds out, she sends her two boys (Jake Busey and Luke Wilson) after the mistress (Barrymore).

Comedy trouble erupts when one of the sons (Wilson) falls for the pregnant fast food clerk.

Not just any fast food flunky, you understand.

Barrymore, replete with red frizzy hair, patterned herself after Dolly Parton.

"She was a good role model," says Barrymore.

She adds that she tried to tap into Parton's innocent sweetness.

"I even went to Dollywood," says Barrymore of Parton's theme park outside of Nashville.

Meanwhile, learning how to walk as a pregnant woman required little effort. She merely strapped on the prosthetic silicon device that made her bulge under her clothes. The 40-pound apparatus also allowed her to appreciate some of the physical difficulties of being with child.

"Especially, when you are pregnant for real you can't unstrap that demon," she says, laughing.

Another fantasy. Barrymore, a strict vegetarian, prepares hamburgers.

"When you make a movie, you have to check your morality at the door. I've played a meat eater, and I've murdered people in movies. But I really wouldn't do it in real life.

"I want to be politically correct in my real life, but you have to remember -- it's a movie.

Home Fries, especially, is a dark but goofy movie, which was apparently fun to make. The only tension on the set came from others who wondered whether Luke Wilson and Drew Barrymore would disrupt filming by breaking up during the shoot. The happy couple was already an item before filming began outside of Austin in '96.

Before that, Barrymore was a mess. A party hound, she had married a Welsh-born L.A. bar owner on a whim. Weeks later, it was over.

That was then -- posing for Playboy, flashing David Letterman on his talk show. All of that.

This is her now -- bright-eyed and doing well emotionally and professionally.

"It used to be amazing to me how people would stick together," she says. "Now I understand. Luke's just a wonderful person, and I enyoy spending my time with him."

Now she can dream, I tell her.

"I had some real good dreams last night," says Barrymore.

I meant aspirations, but I ask her explain the dreams.

"No, no, no," gushes Barrymore. "They were perverted and weird, and I can't get into that."

Okay, what about the aspirations?

"I want to be a director," she finally admits.

"But the biggest aspiration is being a writer. Putting things from your mind and your heart, and connecting them to your arm and then putting it all down is amazing. Writing is cool."

Producing, she knows, is hard work. She's already done that.

Barrymore stars in and produced Never Been Kissed.

She's seen the director's first cut of Been Kissed and offered some thoughts. And she's won an opening date for her film in March, which is what she fought for. "That rocks," she says making the bass player finger plucking movements.

"And I was on time and under budget. I wanted to make a good first impression."

No wonder. She's made so many other impressions over the years.

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