Hot Babe Nadine Velazquez in Maxim magazine

NADINE VELAZQUEZ has two pieces of excellent news from the set of her hit NBC comedy, My Name Is Earl No. 1: "I'm getting more screen time than ever." No. 2: "We're seeing a lot more stripping this year." Some­body rip that new Emmy out of Jaime Pressly's mitts and hand it to Nadine.

Things are afoot in the world of white trash: Nadine's character, Catalina, the superhot cleaningwoman who assists the titular Earl in redeeming his degenerate past, finds herself sleeping with his best friend and, better still, stripping at a place called Club Chubby. She proves very popular with the joint's clientele because, instead of dancing, she just jumps up and down. "That's the hot move," she says. "I love it. It's supposed to be sexy, but it's actu- i ally kind of weird."

In real life it's definitely not her preferred form of striptease. "I like to strip to Sinatra— j that gets the mood going," she says. "I incor- i porate it into my fantasy of being a burlesque dancer. I envision a smoky lounge and an or­chestra, and I'm in fishnets and a little hat." But in the end, Nadine says, wowing a guy doesn't require many props. "The secret to a good strip­tease is just dim lights and a glass of wine."

On the show Catalina's adventures in strip­ping tend to be slightly less refined. "There's an episode this season where I'm catfighting with another stripper—and the cops are just sit­ting back watching because they're enjoying it," she says. "We pulled hair, scratched, and bruised ourselves. I don't get to do that stuff every day, so it was a blast. It reminded me of when I was in high school."

Apparently, Nadine isn't joking about high school brawls and her need to cause bodily harm. She shares this fond memory: "This girl stormed into my Spanish class and called me out. She said, 'Nadine, you and me, bitch!' So— this is so ghetto—I picked up my chair and was about to toss it at her, but our teacher came between us. It was hard-core. High school is like prison." Ghetto or not, it was just that fear­less take-no-prisoners spirit that led Nadine to acting in the first place.

At age 13 Nadine walked into a Chicago tal­ent agency. "I wanted to know how to get on TV," she says. The talent agent, on the other McDonald's. May I take your order?" "Thatwas the biggest moment of my life," she says. "Ihad a McDonald's tie and visor on, and I looked like a boy. But I loved every minute of it."

An even bigger break came when she snagged her Earl gig and the avalanche of acco­lades that came along with it. In 2005 Variety named Nadine one of "Ten Actors to Watch," and USA Today went even further, dubbing her one of the "Five Rising Stars to Watch Closely." (Man, those USA Today guys are creepy.) The huzzahs were followed shortly by a slew of overzealous (read: crazy) fans, including one whogave her a bottle of perfume called Nadine. "It was cool to see my name on the bottle, and I was grateful for the gift," she says, "although it smelled like bourbon."

Up next for Nadine is theTV flick Husband for Hire, in which she plays a woman who has two days to find a husband in order to collect a $25 million inheritance. It's on the Oxygen Chan­nel, but fear not—Nadine assures us that it is "very sexy."We'll take herword for it.