By BRIAN TRUITT
Journal staff writer
The Tastee 29 Diner in Fairfax is about as un-Hollywood as you can get. Until Katie Puckrik sashays in with her electrified, sun-kissed hair and orders a cup of joe.
A Northern Virginia native who is executive-producing and hosting her own variety/talk show, ``Pajama Party,'' on the Oxygen cable network, Puckrik feels as at ease in Vienna as in Los Angeles, where's she's lived for a year.
``To me, this place - my home and where I grew up and went to high school - now feels really foreign and strange,'' Puckrik says. ``But here is where I had the all-important high school years, the all-important Oakton years. Those were formative years that can scar a girl for life, in a positive way. A pretty scar.''
On her show, which airs at 11 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday nights and resembles a large slumber party with grown-ups, Puckrik and her co-host Lisa Kushell gallivant around the bachelorette pad in pajamas discussing women's issues - some serious, most humorous - and interviewing celebrity guests also clad in sleepwear. Sweets - like jellybeans, lollipops and doughnuts, a throwback to her Krispy Kreme days - abound on the set, although Puckrik is hyper enough without them.
During her 37 years, she has done a little bit of everything, from writing a book and dancing with the Pet Shop Boys to singing with the goal of being the next Madonna and dancing as a ballerina. Ironically, Puckrik is now living in the one place she never thought she would live and doing the one thing she never thought she would do.
``[Los Angeles] is kind of an airbrushed version of a mining town, and instead of coal mines, everybody goes to the studios,'' explains Puckrik, while sipping her coffee in the historical landmark diner and letting a few hand gestures slip in here and there. ``And there's a certain amount of monotonous, homogenized beauty. I know it sounds kind of absurd, but you do get sick of seeing pretty people.
``That's one of the things I remember about growing up here, thinking, `I'll never end up in Hollywood. I'm a New York gal,' 'cause I was big on going into D.C. and going to the 9:30 Club.''
She lived in London for 16 years as an adult, and spent much of her childhood in Moscow, Berlin and Indiana - the ``hot spots,'' as she calls them. In a sense, however, she never had a home.
The youngest of four children, Puckrik got used to moving as a part of an Air Force family. Her father, Augustine Puchrik, retired from the military in 1974 after 26 years of service, and the family settled in Vienna. (Katie Puckrik changed the ``h" to a ``k" early in her career to avoid the mangling of her last name.)
By the time she was in Virginia, she had already started honing her television talents.
``[Moving around] was a sink-or-swim situation,'' says Puckrik, who was home to attend her 20th high school reunion. ``You had to walk into that new playground suggesting 100 percent of your personality; there was no room for being a shrinking violet. It was really a case where every new school was a performance, it was a place where you had to interview your new friends and find out which group you were to be in.''
``As a child, she was always very happy, very disciplined,'' remembers her father, Puchrik, 81. ``Her forte was dancing and singing. She had very true pitch. She had that musical ability, and the two went together.''
Once she started attending Oakton, Puckrik involved herself in drama. Her father says she helped to choreograph several, Broadway-type school productions. Amongst all the freaks, geeks, jocks and snobs, she still stood out from the crowd.
``Of course, high school is a regimented and codified social structure that prepares you for a grown-up life,'' Puckrik says. ``I was voted in high school `Most Unique.' I always thought that it was a little bit of a back-handed compliment, like `She's a freakin' weird chick!'
``I definitely marched to a different drummer. I was the kind of kid that would raid Pennywise thrift shop in Vienna and get my whole funk, vintage wardrobe for $3.''
During high school, Puckrik was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature in the spine. She ended up having 10 vertebrae fused and a metal rod put in her back, spending a total of nine months in a plaster body cast.
``By the time I was 19, it got to the state where my spine was getting more and more twisted,'' Puckrik says, ``and the doctors said, `This is ridiculous, you've got to have surgery now.'
``Having that surgery was one of the best things that happened to me in a sense because I got refocused and got back into dancing again. What it also taught me was once I made it through ... that I should just go for the gusto and whatever comes up I should go for.''
Puckrik says she drifted a little after graduating, then moved to London in 1984 with her musician boyfriend. She was into singing and dancing, until, just after the 1991 Pet Shop Boys tour, a friend told her about a host opening for ``The Word,'' a pop culture entertainment show Puckrik describes as ``a Roman circus'' with stunts, live bands and celebrity guests. Beating out 5,000 other applicants, she soon settled in as one of Britain's favorite Americans.
``Because it is a small country, it's not hard to make a name for yourself,'' Puckrik says.
After ``The Word,'' she wanted her own show, one which she could develop and where she had some creative control.
Enter the ghosts of Puckrik's past, stage right.
As a teen-ager, Puckrik says she had sleepovers with her friends where they would have talent contests, discuss boys and smuggle in issues of Penthouse. ``We'd plan what we were going to look like once we hit puberty,'' she says, her voice rising over the clanging of pans emanating from the diner's kitchen. ``That never happened. Penthouse let me down on that one.''
But when it came to finding a format for her own show, Puckrik realized she should base it on what she knows.
``And I'm thinking, `Well, the thing I love to do the most is get together with my girlfriends in an evening - no boys allowed - and mix up a tank of martinis, get out the cake and just let the hair down,'' Puckrik recalls. ``I thought that would make a fantastic basis for a show because a pajama party is a built-in female ritual.''
The show took off in popularity, and Puckrik had additional stints on her own BBC radio series and as a correspondent for VH1's ``Rock Candy.'' She also sat down and wrote what she calls ``a funny/sick coming-of-age memoir'' entitled ``Shooting from the Lip,'' released in 1998.
But soon, it was time for Puckrik to come home to America.
``I never had an aspiration to do television at all,'' Puckrik says. ``As far as I was concerned, I'm an artist, I sing, I dance. I cannot stand in front of a tacky TV set with a microphone and introduce things.''
Whatever Puckrik does, she makes it look at least somewhat artistic, whether she's eyeing a menu or playfully and abruptly bursting into a dance on her show. In simple conversation, she uses fancy wordplay like ``ludicrous,'' ``gratuitous,'' ``salacious'' and ``fastidious.''
It was her witty and stylistic panache which attracted the talent scouts at Oxygen Media - sort of a hipper, edgier version of Lifetime - last year. They were looking for new additions for the network's first season of programming and became intrigued watching her on ``Rock Candy.'' The network execs tracked her to Vienna last Easter, where she was visiting from London, and flew her to New York and offered her a position. Three weeks later, she landed in L.A.
Puckrik quickly had an impact on her co-executive producer, Todd Yasui, a veteran of ``The Tonight Show with Jay Leno'' as a segment producer and a former journalist in the Washington area. One of Yasui's British producer friends in L.A. - a member of what he jokingly refers to as the ``British mafia'' - recommended her to him when Yasui was looking for a job. In their first meeting, Yasui was more impressed by her appetite than her show ideas, as she ate a full meal and convinced him to order dessert with her.
``I'm used to women ordering a celery stick with an olive,'' says Yasui, 37. ``Pushing someone to order dessert in Hollywood is like lighting up a cigarette in the front row of a church.
``We immediately hit it off. We had the same warped sense of humor. I thought she was a little bit eccentric, in a genuine way.''
The rapport continued to grow between the pair as production started on the first season, which began airing in February. Yasui says they would get tanked up on coffee and doughnuts - sometimes literally - and make each other crack up during production meetings.
Puckrik says she prefers the American version of ``Pajama Party'' to the British incarnation. She's more in charge over here, so she says the show has taken on more of her sense of humor and takes on life. Puckrik had to explain the idea behind a pajama party to British natives, since their only exposure to the ritual is from movies like ``Grease.'' And she has also replaced the beehive-wigged female trio, who sang lounge lizard-like covers of heavy metal and punk classics, with Dan and the Dan Band, the only males regularly ``allowed'' on the show.
``They're rednecky-looking guys who do impassioned versions of women's anthems,'' Puckrik says. ``Not in a camp sort of way, but in an `I mean it, man' sort of way.''
During a show which aired in April, Puckrik brought out a plate full of childhood treats. For guest Megan Mullally of TV's ``Will and Grace,'' there was a mustard sandwich. A peanut butter-and-banana one awaited co-host Kushell's hungry stomach. But Puckrik topped them all with a peanut butter-mayonnaise-and-lettuce combo.
``It has a vinegariness of the Miracle Whip with the inner-cutting, sweet-saltyness of the peanut butter.'' But isn't that kind of, well, disgusting? ``I would heartily recommend it, although not when you're hosting a show because I found it hard to talk with my palate and tongue glued together.''
On ``Pajama Party,'' the bubbly hostess has tackled such juicy topics as a strippers museum, the L.A. coroner's gift shop, Hollywood suicide tours, a dog psychic and Nun Recruitment Day. She would like there to be no sacred cows, but the network has cut some segments from the show because they were deemed ``too racy.''
``One of my concerns is that I don't want it to go into this chick ghetto of being anti-men or men-bashing or the whole victim thing,'' Puckrik says. ``I find that so old-fashioned and boring.''
Other than the time she got a lollipop stuck to her inner thigh, Puckrik says one of her crazier segments - one that involves '70s teen pop idol David Cassidy - will air in the new season, which begins at 11 p.m. on Dec. 2. She has had a crush on the singer since childhood, and she did a feature where she went to Las Vegas to find and meet him. But Yasui and other producers played a prank on her: At a venue where he was performing, he supposedly had the flu and couldn't meet her, but while she was skulking around and looking at a picture on the wall, Cassidy came up from behind and surprised her.
``They caught it all on camera,'' Puckrik says. ``It's really, really funny because I go from being cornily hammy as I am, like `Where's David, I've got to find David!' to really losing it for real and you can see the difference. And my eyes were pinwheels, and I can hardly talk. I'm sort of sobbing and trying not to cry, and he's kissing me. It was an emotional carwreck.''
The word from the man and woman on the street, as well as the Oxygen grand poobahs, has been positive about the show. Puckrik's harshest analysis has actually come from her parents.
``I think there's a large amount of shock to seeing one's daughter or family member on television,'' Puckrik says. ``At home, I'm modulated and gentile, and the next thing you know, I'm on television running around a set or doing an item on the strippers musuem in the California desert.
``My mother's reaction was ... horror. And the first thing she said to me was, `I hope you don't mind but I have brutal criticisms about your show. And I do mean brutal.'''
Some of Mom's complaints were that her daughter was hogging the doughnuts, talking too fast and waving her arms around like Joan Rivers, along with having a problem with the pajama-clad audience looking like a ``harem.''
``I think she's given up on me since I've stayed true to my natural, flailing tendencies,'' Puckrik says. ``And my dad also said I talked too fast, but I think he's a closet ``Pajama Party'' watcher.''
Sitting in the popular Fairfax diner on a Friday morning, Puckrik says her life has come ``full circle.'' She was ``terrified'' about attending her reunion but like everything else in her life, however, it fit right into place.
``When I went to the hotel where the reunion was, I was halfway thinking, `Are the bullies still going to be bullies? Are the snotty cheerleaders still going to be snotty cheerleaders?''' Puckrik says. ``But the delightful surprise was that, in 20 years, people have grown into the person that they're going to be forever.
``Everyone had a huge interest, a sort of humble interest, in other people. It was this really great kind of love-in, where people were coming up to each other going, `You were mean to me in high school. What was your problem?' And the other person would just be laughing, going, `I don't know, because I thought you were great.'''
While she gets back here at least twice every year, Puckrik says her family is always welcome to visit her at her home in Laurel Springs near Los Angeles. And it would be a double attraction for her father, who grew up in nearby El Segundo.
Just short of that, Puckrik always has at least one facet of her Virginia life to visit in sunny Los Angeles. Where do you think all those doughnuts on the show come from?
``I thought I was safe from Krispy Kreme,'' Puckrik laughs, ``Then I moved out to L.A. and they followed me out there, instead of getting away from the evil Southern doughnuts.''
For more information on ``Pajama Party'' or Oxygen Media, visit www.oxygen.com.