HOLLYWOOD -- Carmen Electra has a cutesy pet name for Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star to whom she was briefly married in a circus-style freak show.

She calls him "Little Choo-Choo" and teases him mercilessly, if still affectionately, about his baby-boy behaviour. "He's going to kill me," Electra says, laughing, about revealing their secret.

While divorced since last October, the 27-year-old Electra and the 39-year-old Rodman are still best friends, still profess mutual love and still hang together at parties, including Rodman's latest birthday bash in Las Vegas.

"I have all these little names for him," she continues, "but he's mad because all his friends found out and now they tease him. But he is so 'Little Choo-Choo' -- he is! He is a little baby."

Electra, a singer, dancer, model, former Playboy Playmate and sometimes actress, is a little ingenuous. She bubbles. She burbles. She giggles. And now she is willing to make fun of herself as well as Dennis Rodman.

In the spoof Scary Movie, Keenen Ivory Wayans' bad-taste, sexually gross send-up of teen horror comedies, Electra's image as a TV-movie vixen is trashed. With her help.

Goofy

In the pre-title sequence of the movie, which opened this weekend, Electra plays the first victim of a Scream-like serial killer. Among many goofy things, she runs across the lawn in her underwear, through a sprinkler, in slow motion. It's a Baywatch reference -- Electra had replaced fellow buxom bathing-suit beauty Pamela Anderson Lee on the jigglevision TV series.

Slobbering boy-men ogle Electra's Playboy spread in the movie, and the killer taunts her for having a lover who dresses up in women's clothing, telling her he's waiting outside. Electra opens the door and ...

The audience expects Rodman. Instead, we get a Prince lookalike, ha ha. Prince was once Electra's musical and sexual mentor. She split from his purple Minneapolis compound in 1994, arriving in Hollywood to carve out her career as an actress and sex object.

"It lets people know that I don't really take myself that seriously," Electra tells The Sun. "I do have a very serious side to me, but it definitely has nothing to do with my sexuality. It has more to do with my spirituality and what I believe in and the people in my life that I love and care about.

"But posing for Playboy is not serious." Neither, she says, is running through sprinklers in her bra and panties in Scary Movie. "To mock yourself in that way is hilarious and I'm a silly person. I have a sense of humour. I do that kind of silly stuff when I'm with my friends. So why not spoof it and make everybody laugh? Why not? So there!"

Electra did try to persuade Rodman to do a cameo as the driver of a car that slams into her in one scene, sending her hurtling into the air and landing with a splat. She calls the notion "cool" and laments, "But he had a difficult schedule at the time. I think he was shooting something."

Electra's willingness to satirize herself tells you a lot about her -- as well as the fact that gross-out movies are hot again this summer. Electra is not the little sexpot princess or complete airhead that she seemed to be when she married Rodman on a whim Nov. 14, 1998, after he spent all night drinking and gambling in Las Vegas.

Electra is adamant that she married Rodman out of love and in extreme emotional pain. Her 61-year-old mother had just died of a cancerous brain tumour. Her 40-year-old sister had died a week later of a heart attack. Rodman, whom she had been dating for months in a whirlwind of clubbing and trips to gambling dens, was the only 'family' she could relate to at the time. He would serve as a distraction.

"I had a really hard year," Electra recalls. "Dennis was there for me. He was a person who really stood by my side and even though he IS crazy -- we ALL know he is crazy -- he really does have a good heart and I can see that.

"When he asked me to marry him I said: Maybe this crazy guy really is human and maybe he really does love me. It was the best feeling, but then it all went crazy, it went all nuts."

Electra's story is instructive: Dreams do come true, but they're not always what you imagined. Born into a humble working-class family as Tara Patrick in the American Midwest, Electra changed her name at the suggestion of Prince. She fantasized about becoming a celebrity.

"I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio, a small city," she says. "I had a dream to come to L.A. and become famous and make a life for myself and to take care of my family. Be careful of what you ask for: I am a celebrity. I have that kind of scary luck.

"In fact, I get chills and my eyes water because I remember sitting down and making a list when I was still back in Cincinnati. That's my thing: I make lists of what I want to accomplish. I can go back and look at my list and check off almost everything. It's really scary."

Ambition

That list included landing a record deal and a role on Baywatch, posing for Playboy, buying a car and a house and grabbing "really great small roles in some cool films."

Electra figures she has all that and more. "Maybe I'm just really lucky. But, with that luck, there is that hard side. People assume that because I'm a sex symbol and a lot of guys want to be with me, 'She must be happy, her life must be great.' The reality is I've had a hard time."

She is eager to be understood, to be thought of as human, to be given a chance to be more than a Playmate sexual fantasy for the prison inmates who send her fan mail.

So she talks, in hopes that a glimmer of the real her will come through. "Running away and hiding does not work, for me. Now I really feel that finally things are getting better. And I've actually been out of the media a little bit.

"It's time to stir up a little controversy."


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