Is a Nitro Girl Combustible Outside the Ring?

The trashiest line of work for women in television today--barring “Jerry Springer” guest appearances, of course--almost surely is cheerleader for World Championship Wrestling, as a Nitro Girl.

The newest Nitro Girl, Skye, wears tube tops, fishnets and hot pants. She bumps and grinds and does hip thrusts in the ring between televised wrestling matches involving behemoths named the Total Package and Dr. Death.

Back home, in her real world in Rosedale, Md., you’d never recognize her.

In November, Stacy “Skye” Keibler beat out 300 competitors for a $10,000 check and a Nitro Girl spot. Her winning performance--a 90-second high-energy dance routine during the WCW’s “Monday Nitro”--was seen on television by 4.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Since her TV debut, the 20-year-old Keibler has been busy, in and out of the ring. These days, Nitro Girls wrestle as well as dance. So recently, Skye “knocked out” fellow Nitro Girl Spice with a makeup case and drew on her face with lipstick, then hip-checked a 300-pound Nitro Girl wannabe who tried to muscle in on a dance routine.

Trashy, trashy, trashy!

But outside the ring, Keibler isn’t Skye.

She still lives with her folks in the house where she grew up, still sleeps in the same room in the same twin bed with the white porcelain crucifix and the poster of babies dressed as teddy bears hanging above the headboard. She still dates the same guy she’s been going with since the summer after her freshman year at the Catholic High School of Baltimore. She wears jeans and no makeup.

Trashy she’s not.

“I’m not like that,” Keibler says, the sting of having to defend herself audible in her sweet, girlish voice. “I’m just doing what I like to do.”

What she likes to do is dance. Any kind of dance: ballet, jazz, tap. She’s been taking lessons since age 3.

“She danced from the minute she was born,” her mother, Pat, boasts. “Stacy was one of those kids you’d find dancing on top of the coffee table.”

Mention Keibler to her former dance teacher, Jean Kettell Gable, and the reaction is immediate. “Those legs,” she says. “They went up forever.”

Those legs, clad in dark navy jeans with a 36-inch inseam, are neatly crossed as Keibler sits in her parents’ living room, her mother by her side.

She is 5 feet, 11 inches tall, she says, standing and stretching as if to make the point. “Too tall for the Rockettes,” she adds, sounding slightly wistful.

Instead, she found ways to perform closer to home: modeling, earning bit parts in movies such as “Liberty Heights” and “Pecker,” and becoming a cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens.

All of this helped prepare her for her stint as a Nitro Girl. That and not missing an episode of “Monday Nitro” for the last three years.

Keibler’s boyfriend, Kris Cumberland, has been watching WCW for years. She joined him--reluctantly, at first.

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” she says. Then the couple attended a live WCW show together, and she was swept up in the athleticism, the enthusiasm and the show biz. She was smitten. “It’s a soap opera,” she says.

She’s right. Professional wrestling is part soap opera, part action-adventure, part cartoon, part Oprah and part love story. There are good guys--”babyfaces” in wrestling lingo--and bad guys, or “heels.”

“Monday Nitro,” which airs from a different city each week, regularly sells out 20,000-seat arenas.

“It used to be the Nitro Girls would come out and dance for 30 seconds,” Keibler says. “If you changed the channel, you could miss them. Now the girls are getting scripted into the action.”

And already the Nitro girls are at war.

Try to keep up: The war started when Kimberly Page, the group’s founder and a former Playboy bunny, quit the Nitro Girls to avoid being stalked by a psycho wrestler. A power struggle ensued, and the babyfaces faced off against the heels. It was three against three, with two girls remaining neutral. Spice, a babyface, fought A.C. Jazz for the title of group leader and won. A.C. Jazz left the group. Tygress, a heel, plotted to usurp Spice’s power.

Thrown into this chaos, Keibler’s character, Skye, had to make a choice: Was she a good girl or a bad girl? Actually, the writers made the choice.

“I’m a heel,” Keibler says, giggling.

So a woman who says she’s never had a fight in her life is now pulling hair, shouting and fighting on national television.

“Stacy’s so nice and easygoing. I just can’t see her playing a bad guy,” Keibler’s friend and Ravens cheerleading captain Teri DiFatta agrees. “She must be a good actress.”

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Acting, in fact, is Keibler’s ultimate goal. Being a Nitro Girl is great and all--the fans, the performing, the travel to such exotic places as Little Rock, Ark.; Detroit; and Indianapolis. But it isn’t her dream job.

Other Nitro Girls have gone on to pursue a variety of careers. Tayo is trying to make it as a country singer. Whisper got married. A.C. Jazz left to run her own cheerleading company. But now, Keibler is simply too busy to dream about the future.

Along with modeling, being a Ravens cheerleader and a Nitro Girl, she is a full-time student (on partial scholarship) at Towson University, in Towson, Md.--a mass communications major with a 3.7 GPA.

Keibler is rarely home. Her bed is covered with pieces of open luggage spewing feathered, filmy shrugs and sequined halters--her Nitro Girl costumes.

Next semester, when football season is over, things will be less hectic, she says. She’ll only be taking three classes, one via the Internet, one at night and a third drawing on her Nitro experience for internship credits in film production.

Maybe she’ll have time then to watch television with her boyfriend, see her friends, go to the gym, hang out. Maybe.

The phone rings. It’s for Keibler.

She’s gone only for a moment, then returns with a sigh and flops on the couch.

“They want me to bring black vinyl shorts and fishnets to practice on Sunday,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Where am I going to find those in Baltimore?”