Take it off (the pounds, that is)
A funny thing happened to Carmen Electra on her way to starring in the Pussycat Dolls campy burlesque show last year: She got lean doing a mean bump and grind.
So when a production company asked the actress if she wanted to do a striptease video -- sorry, an aerobic striptease video -- she said yes.
This isn’t the first time Hollywood and fitness have hooked up, but this time it’s considerably more risque than Jane Fonda’s pelvic thrusts or Suzanne Somers’ thigh squeezes. Yet this recent convergence proves that there’s still an interest in celebs and their workout routines, especially when it involves R-rated activity. (No, Electra doesn’t take her clothes off).
Electra may be best known to some for her Playboy magazine shoots, her stint on “Baywatch” or that blink-of-an-eye marriage to former basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman. So what qualifies her to do an exercise video, besides a pretty face and figure? Actually, Electra is a trained dancer who used to perform with Prince and who, in a review in this newspaper of her burlesque dance troupe Pussycat Dolls, was described as “a surprisingly nifty little hoofer.”
“Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease,” a five-part DVD series, was officially launched at a party recently at the Spectrum Club in Santa Monica attended by a smattering of celebs and young Hollywood exec types. They hung out inside and outside the club, occasionally gawking at a TV screen playing one of her new workouts. The celebrity quotient included supermodel Shalom Harlow, who confessed that her workout of choice is yoga but said she has a deep appreciation for the art of the strip.
“I’ve gone to strip clubs to watch because it really is a performance,” she said. “If I could do that thing where they clutch the pole and spin themselves around like a swizzle stick -- that’s an incredible feat! You’ve got to feel good about yourself if you can do that -- well, maybe not if you’re scrounging up dollar bills at the end.”
It was during rehearsals for Pussycat Dolls last year at the Roxy on Sunset that Electra noticed she was getting in great shape. “I’ve always thought that dancers and strippers have the most amazing bodies,” she said. “When we were rehearsing, everything just sort of leaned out. I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, but I really toned up. And I was having fun and getting into shape.”
She said this as she sat in a Spectrum Club office. Wearing a skin-tight camouflage green mini-dress, a suite of long gold chain jewelry and black eyelashes that reached almost to her eyebrows, the 31-year-old actress said that before working on the DVD with Dolls creator and choreographer Robin Antin, she could fake a striptease but “didn’t know the finer points.”
Antin said inspiration for the choreography came from legendary strippers such as Lily St. Cyr and Gypsy Rose Lee, plus “being at strip clubs and seeing girls dancing on poles.”
Chris Gibbin, the series’ executive producer, says Electra was perfect for the project. “I mean, you wouldn’t want Gwyneth Paltrow teaching you striptease aerobics, would you?” he said. Point well taken -- Electra is known for running in slow-mo in a skimpy bathing suit, while Paltrow stars as troubled poet Sylvia Plath in a new biopic.
Electra is not the first to try to turn stripping into a legitimate workout. The Crunch gym chain has its much-hyped Cardio Striptease classes in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
And Electra’s strip workout does include a serious exercise component, under the guidance of Los Angeles fitness instructor Michael Carson, who concentrates on leg, hip and glute-toning routines that complement the striptease routines and burlesque movements. There’s no pole work in the series, but props include a chair. Each of the five workouts lasts 40 minutes to an hour and can be bought individually.
As the series is launched via infomercials and the Internet, one wonders if the workout will be taken seriously by women, who buy most of the exercise videos sold in the United States, or find a more limited audience: men hoping to see a Playboy model bumping and grinding.
“I welcome men to buy it,” she says with a laugh, “but it’s truly a workout video. I think women are extremely curious about striptease, but you can feel intimidated going into a class. But if you’re home and no one’s watching you, you can just be free, get into it and have fun with it.”
Perhaps she has a point. Fun, say exercise experts, is one element often missing from most people’s fitness regimens, which usually include stair-stepping machines, not stripping.
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Jeannine Stein can be reached at jeannine.stein@latimes.com.
