Carmen
Electra
Carmen Electra
was born in Cincinnati (Ohio) on April 20, 1972. Of course, back
then she was Tara Leigh Patrick, just a little girl growing up in
White Oak, Ohio. At the age of nine, she was selected for the School
for Creative and Performing Arts. While she was there she took singing
lessons, and by her teenage years, she was dancing in musicals and
doing her own choreographing for the school's theater ensemble.
Her goal was to eventually make it out to Los Angeles and get a
record deal, and at age fifteen, she took her first big step.
She moved out to Minneapolis to stay with her sister and half sister,
and earned money acting as a model for the Target department stores.
Four years later, she packed up shop and moved to L.A., changed
her name to Carmen Electra, and one week later,
she met the artist formerly known as Prince. For all practical purposes,
she had just been ‘discovered’.
In 1992, after meeting and auditioning for Prince, Carmen
Electra was signed to his Paisley Park Records label. Despite
the fact that Prince took her under his wing (including promotions
for her album in Rolling Stone and on MTV) her first album was a
dud. The video for the single "Go-Go Dancer" was seldom
seen on MTV, and when the 12" single hit the stores in June
(1992) it almost went straight to the bargain bin. In 1995, Carmen
Electra reinvented herself and appeared on the Nickelodeon
show ALL THAT. In March of 1996, Carmen posed nude for Playboy and
did a Playboy video, Playboy Cheerleaders, in which she sings the
show stopper ‘2-4-6-8.' Also in 1996, Carmen Electra
hosted MTV's Loveline - only a glimpse of things to come. On October
4, 1996, Lisa Berger (MTV's senior vice president of original programming)
announced that Carmen Electra had been selected
to replace Jenny McCarthy on the MTV show Singled Out. The deal
was for at least 65 episodes.
Since that announcement, Carmen Electra was signed
on to replace Pamela Anderson on Baywatch, she has appeared in a
comic book, appeared as a national spokesperson for Budweiser and
recently filmed a small role in the independent feature Dust and
Stardust, a movie about making it and not making it in Hollywood.
Carmen currently lives in Los Angeles, and the last we heard, she
was definitely having the last laugh.
