Go Ask Suzi : Her radio show isn’t for the faint of heart. But Suzi Landolphi’s humorous, no-holds-barred approach to sex education is bringing in listeners.

The caller to the radio show is a young woman who isn’t sure if what she’s feeling during sex is an orgasm.

Going down the checklist in her head, Suzi Landolphi, the show’s host, ticks off the numerous changes that occur in a woman’s body during climax.

“You’re feeling all of those?” she asks. “OK, great!”

The next caller is a man who wants to talk about submissive role-playing with a dominant partner.

“Now what does this mean exactly?” Landolphi asks enthusiastically, poised over a slew of questions. “It isn’t always about sex, is it?”

If it’s the middle of the evening on a weeknight, then the airwaves emanating from KMPC-AM belong to Suzi Landolphi.

In the nine weeks she has had her three-hour, five-nights-a-week show, she’s found an audience hungry to talk about sex and relationships in a no-holds-barred arena.

The show is the latest outlet for the 45-year-old Landolphi, a television and film producer/director who segued into sex and AIDS education more than a decade ago. She’s widely credited with mixing fact with humor and taking it on the lecture circuit.

Her “Hot, Sexy and Safer” is a one-woman show that debunks myths about homosexuality, warns of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, encourages responsibility and self-esteem, and offers been-there/done-that anecdotes, all wrapped up in a comic, audience-participation package that often ends with a condom being inflated on a young man’s head.

Last year the show spawned a book of the same name (published by Perigee). In the works is an infomercial that further investigates interpersonal relationships and sexual fulfillment. She’s also co-owner of the Condomania store chain.

This is not sex talk for the prudish. But neither is it gratuitously titillating soft pornography for heavy breathers. It’s just Landolphi telling it as she sees it.

Al Brady Law, KMPC and KABC operations manager, hired Landolphi after yearlong “on and off” conversations to fill the slot left by “Twentysomething Talk” with Tavis Smiley and Ruben Navarrette.

“Is this breaking new ground? I don’t think so,” Law says. “ ‘Loveline’ [with Dr. Drew Pinsky, which overlaps Landolphi’s show on KROQ-FM] has been there. The ground was really broken by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. But Suzi’s able to talk about what could be a controversial subject in a very upbeat, positive, responsible way.”

Her show debuts at a time when talk radio is under red-hot scrutiny by those who question whether public airwaves are the proper forum for political and race issues.

So far the station has logged few complaints, but Landolphi knows it’s still early in the game.

“I’m sure they’ll get to me eventually.”

Morning light is streaming in through Landolphi’s kitchen in the idyllic, white picket-fenced Los Feliz house she shares with 22-year-old daughter Kyrsha, Aphrodite the cat, Irie the dog, and soon-to-be-husband No. 5, film producer David Pritchard.

They moved in not long ago when Landolphi decided to trade the working-class neighborhoods of Massachusetts that she’d known for 44 years for the looser atmosphere of L.A.

She smoothes back unruly thick black hair, still damp from a shower, and tucks her legs under her small frame.

“I came here because I would be considered not weird,” she says. “I spent too many years beating my head against the bricks of New England.”

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New England was where Landolphi built a career as a theater administrator, actress and TV/film producer, forming her own company in the early ‘80s to turn out industrial films, commercials and public-service announcements.

While producing and directing, Landolphi read about AIDS and became alarmed at its projected potential for destruction. She became an AIDS hospice volunteer, then trained as an AIDS educator. Because she had a teen-age daughter and could relate to young people, she was tapped to speak at high schools, junior highs and colleges.

The demand for her on the public speaking circuit grew, and within a couple of months Landolphi knew she had a new career as well as a calling.

On Jan. 1, 1989, she got out of the producing and directing game and started a company called “Hot, Sexy and Safer.” Soon she was getting $500 to speak at campuses around the country. She now earns $3,000.

With so much to convey and so much at stake, Landolphi needed a way to make a big impression in an hour and a half. Her show has always included lighter moments, like the inflating condom trick. But Landolphi also found that relating anecdotes about her life--some hilarious, some horrific--was a quick conduit to the audience’s attention.

Landolphi, the second of three children, was a natural performer who dreamed of being a dancer until she decided she was too short and looked too “ethnic” to make it.

Family pictures suggest a happy American family in two-dimensional black and white: older sister Judy, younger brother Jimmy, mother, father, one photo of Suzi in a dance recital costume fashioned from her mother’s favorite black dress.

What they don’t reveal is the breakup of her parents’ marriage, or the emotional and physical abuse Landolphi says she suffered at the hands of her late father. Neither is there evidence of the alcoholism Landolphi says her mother battled, nor her own nightly problem from age 5 to 10 with bed-wetting, which promptly stopped the week her mother attended her first AA meeting.

In spite of the problems, Landolphi says her mother, who committed suicide 18 years ago after a long battle with cancer, was her strongest ally. She was a woman, Landolphi says, who encouraged her daughter to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed in. “Literally, my mom was a perfect human being,” she says emphatically.

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In high school, Landolphi was vice president of the student council, the first female to hold that office. She was also head cheerleader. But she hardly fit the stereotype of the goody-goody pompon girl. In high school she instigated a cafeteria food strike, and while at Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., she gave up membership in a prestigious honor society because black students were not allowed.

“That was a defining moment for me,” she says, “to take a stand on something and not just to go along.”

Yet despite Landolphi’s passion to do the right thing, inside she was dealing with crippling insecurity.

“I knew that I looked like a person who had great self-esteem,” she recalls, “which made it even worse. What I had to do was try to get my image and my reality closer together.”

She worked on merging the two for years, through four marriages and other relationships with both men and women.

“Being married four times is a clear indication that I was struggling with who I was and what I needed,” Landolphi says.

“I’m not ashamed of that, I’m actually proud to think that I’m one of those people who keeps on till I get it right. But you can’t build a partnership when you have this huge black hole inside you.”

Coming to terms with her frailties made it easier to relate to teen-agers and young adults about theirs. Instead of finger-wagging about dangerous behavior, she talks about a period in her life when she didn’t use condoms, when denial overtook common sense.

Landolphi has crisscrossed the country from Prescott, Ariz., to Plymouth, N.H., appearing on campuses and doing benefits. But since the radio show is a major time commitment, she has had to cut down on her speaking engagements.

Many high schools and colleges have given Landolphi rave reviews in campus newspaper write-ups. She appeared at Occidental College last August during orientation to an appreciative group of incoming freshmen.

“She spoke to the students in a language they understood without being overly technical,” says Mary Kay Poljan, director of student activities. “I like the fact that [her talk] isn’t just about intercourse, but about respect and knowing yourself first. People have fun with it because she’s not beating you over the head with a message.”

Not everyone has been so enthusiastic.

Three students from Chelmsford High School in Chelmsford, Mass., filed a $3.5-million suit in District Court in August, 1993, claiming they were “shocked, outraged, humiliated and intimidated” by Landolphi’s April, 1992, performance.

Landolphi says the case never went to trial, but a federal judge decided in her favor. The plaintiffs, however, have appealed the decision.

And Claremont McKenna College is not anxious to have Landolphi back. Her second appearance at the school in September, 1994, was a disappointment, says Bonnie Snortum, director of the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, where Landolphi spoke to about 150 students.

“I think she misjudged her audience and its level of sophistication,” says Snortum, who added that Landolphi’s first performance placed more emphasis on sexual responsibility. “She sort of low-balled the evening. She relied on the shock value of words. . . . It was sort of like a bad HBO comedy special. The students weren’t offended, but I don’t think anybody walked away with anything meaningful.”

Landolphi recalls the response from the Claremont students as “wonderful. I got a standing ovation, so what can you say? You don’t get that if you’re talking down to someone.”

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No criticism has even slightly daunted Landolphi, who refuses to change a word of her show or censor her radio program.

Once her infomercial is done, Landolphi will be on to other projects. She’s working on another book, and would like to hit late-night television again (she starred in “Late Date With Suzi,” a talk show that aired for six weeks last summer on KCAL TV).

Does she worry about being pigeonholed as just a sex educator, albeit a humorous one?

“A little bit,” she says. “You worry only in that you hope all your talents and your tools are able to be utilized. I think it’s up to me how I handle myself.

“I never feel victimized anymore. I never feel like someone’s going to do something to me that I don’t have control over. So if the media jumps on this particular bandwagon that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not still directing a play here or acting or writing. It’s up to me to make sure that I do.”