IN HER OWN words, Carla Collins is “like Olive Oil in a zumba class on Ritalin.”

It’s as apt a description as any for the flamboyant actor, comedian and author of the self-help book Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags who will be playing a series of stand-up shows in southern Ontario this month.

Spend a few moments with her and you’ll find yourself strapped into the “Mulholland Drive” of conversations as it takes turns both scatological and sarcastic at breakneck velocity while also breaking sharply for poignancy and sincerity.

She talks with equal ease about boob jobs (hers) and addiction (her father’s) before switching gears to explain the utter awesomeness of Top Gun and Groucho Marx and why Shemp is the thinking woman’s Stooge.

But I’ve caught Collins in a quiet — or at least, quieter — and more reflective mood when I call her at her Malibu home on a recent Sunday afternoon. “It’s a gift when I’m quiet,” she says.

Collins was out late the night before — she was headlining at the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club although she hesitates to make a big deal about it — and now she’s enjoying some serious cuddle time with Dr. Zira, a Chihuahua–miniature pinscher mix, and Miles, a comically conceived Chihuahua-Great Dane mix.

“Can you imagine the logistics? There must have been a trampoline involved,” she says.

Collins is a huge animal rights advocate, and both Dr. Zira and Miles are dogs she rescued. She has a tattoo of the paw of her last dog, Buster, on her rib cage and even wears the late black Lab’s dog tags.“Dog is man’s best friend, but a white woman’s soulmate. But I’m not one of the crazy ones who think they are my children.That would make me hairier,” she says, “and a bitch.”

Just like that, she’s punched the clutch and dropped the conversation into fourth gear with the top rolled down.

The former host of Entertainment Now, Collins admits she’s still adjusting to life in la-la land. She moved there from Toronto a few years ago and is now happily married to Tyrone Power Jr., the son of the swashbuckling screen legend.

“No one in Los Angeles gets sarcasm. I make an outrageous statement like ‘I have to get home to feed my five monkeys,’ and people respond by asking their names. Anything’s possible here, and it turns out there actually is a lady who lives here and her house is full of monkeys. She actually had to move into the guest house so the monkeys could have the main house.”

Collins was born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, which she says is a lot like L.A.

“They’re both one-industry towns,” she says. “But there are more cabs in the Soo.”

She was both prom queen and valedictorian of her high school graduating class and got her start in show business as a Weather Network host in 1990.

More TV and radio gigs followed, ranging from playing “anchorwoman” in Universal Soldier 2, with Burt Reynolds and Gary Busey, to a regular stint on Paradise Falls to her first stand-up special, The Wonder Bra Years, in 2001.

More recently, she starred in two seasons of the Carlawood, a reality TV satire that follows her as she tries to make it big in Hollywood and start a new business with her husband called the Grin Reapers, which provides personalized comedic entertainment at wakes, funerals and memorials.“It’s not like we’re doing Andrew Dice Clay at these events,” she says.

But even while she’s getting comfortable in California, she’s never far from home.

Her mom lives in Toronto, as does her first husband, Jon Burnside, who is running for city councillor — “Ward 26 Don Valley West represent!” — and for whom Collins and comedian pal Colin Mochrie hosted a fundraiser.

“Los Angeles is a whole festival of crazy,” Collins says.“Toronto is my town. I get nosebleeds north of Lawrence.”

That’s why, when she’s here, you’ll find her having lunch at Joso’s in Yorkville, doing yoga at Downward Dog, working out at Roland Semprie Rosedale and shopping for clothes at Long Legs, “which is at 2717 Yonge Street,” she says. “It’s a great store for any woman over five foot seven. It’s a magical place where a woman with a white girl flat ass and orangutan arms can find clothes that fit.”

Oh yeah, and once a year she visits the Advanced Laser and Cosmetic Surgery Centre at 120 Spadina Rd., “where I believe they inject me with the blood of young teenage boys in order to maintain my youthful appearance!”

On Nov. 6 she’ll be in the city to host the Children’s Aid Society’s Teddy Bear Affair, and then there are her upcoming shows in Belleville (Nov. 19), Cobourg (Nov. 20) and Oshawa (Nov. 21). Called Venus Envy, “the show is for women (and men in drag) only,” Collins says. “How do your legs look in heels?”

And then there are all of the appearances to promote her book. “It’s the one thing I’ve done that’s gotten all positive reviews,” she says, tempting fate. “I wonder who will be the one to ruin it?”

Collins is a big fan of self-help books, like The Secret, but she finds so many of them aren’t really that helpful. “There’s a hypocriticalness to a lot of them: ‘I was born fabulous, I’m fabulous now.’That doesn’t really make anything better,” she says. “Mine is a little more down-to-earth than some of those others.”

While not strictly an autobiography, Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags is a candid yet comedic account of Collins’s life, including coping with her father’s severe gambling addiction that forced him to lead a secret double life.

“I don’t mean to sound trite, but writing the book taught me to write from the heart,” she says. “There are some pretty poignant things in there that I’ve never talked about before publicly.”Which is saying a lot given Collins’s inhibition when it comes to using her personal life in her stand-up routines.

“Just don’t expect any Mackenzie Phillips–type secrets being revealed,” she adds. “My book is fairly tame by comparison. I’m not a Russian doll of mystery. It’s simply the world’s longest drunken Tweet.”

What certainly isn’t a secret is Collins’s close relationship with her mother, who even edited Angels, Vampires and Douche Bags before Collins sent it to her publisher to edit.

And she wasn’t looking for family skeletons to stick back in the closet — she was checking the spelling. “It was like cleaning the house before the cleaning lady comes. She wanted to make sure I made a good impression with my editor.”

As the interview winds down, the conversation turns randomly to Top Gun, the Tom Cruise fighter jock blockbuster. It’s a film she’s watched countless times, including on one of her first dates with her husband.

“He watched it, and all he did was talk about how unrealistic the dogfights were, how they would never last that long,” Collins says. “He just didn’t get it.” Of course that didn’t stop her from marrying Power.

JERRY STILLER IS on the phone from his apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. He is gracious. He is congenial. He is calm. His voice, possessing a grandfatherly gruffness, barely rises above a polite whisper.

In short, Jerry Stiller is nothing like the abrasive loudmouth characters he’s bestknown for, especially the career-defining Frank Costanza,the TV Guide-obsessed, Mannsierre-wearing, long-suffering and insufferable father of Jason Alexander’s George Costanza on Seinfeld.

And while it doesn’t come as a shock — after all,Stiller is an actor with dozens of film and TV credits, from Hart To Hart and Simon & Simon to The Love Boat and Murder She Wrote to LA Law and Law & Order – it is a little disappointing that he’s not more… Costanza-esque.

“I hear that a lot,” says Stiller, with a chuckle. “Everybody wants to know if I’m like Frank Costanza. It’s tremendous to be associated with a character and a show that people have such an affection for, although I do find it a bit surprising sometimes.”

Hardly a day goes by that someone — a diner at Stiller’s favourite deli, a cab driver, a tourist near Times Square — doesn’t lob a Costanza catchphrase in his direction: “Serenity now!” “Festivus for the rest of us!” “Hoochey momma!”“Del Boca Vista!”

“It’s incredible. I love that,” he says, with genuine enthusiasm. In fact, Stiller fully expects to hear a few of his famous lines shouted from the audience when he brings his one-man show to the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on November 23.

The show, derived from his memoir, Married To Laughter, will consist of Stiller getting on stage and telling stories about his life and career, from his New York childhood listening to Eddie Cantor on the radio and dreaming of a Jew in the White House, to appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show (36 times!) with his wife and comedy partner Anne Meara, to starring in his son’s blockbuster comedy Zoolander.

Maybe he’ll tell the story about the time Groucho Marx invited him over for dinner. “We watched A Night at the Opera but I couldn’t laugh,” says Stiller. “He kept stopping the projector to tell stories and explain things.”

You can also be sure there will be plenty of anecdotes from his days on Seinfeld and King of Queens, on which he played another cantankerous father.

“I’ve been in plays,movies and all that, but this is something that I’ve always wanted to do, to be up there as a standup comedian,” he says. Telling his own story is something Stiller began to think about when he would find himself alone at parties.“People want to be around the most famous people, the biggest stars or celebrities, and I would be off in the corner wondering, ‘Why isn’t anyone talking to me?’ If you want to be the centre of attention at a party and you’re not Tom Cruise or George Clooney, then you better have something interesting to say. So I started putting stories together and that’s the show.”

If you’re wondering where the yin to Stiller’s comedy yang will be while her husband’s getting all the laughs on stage, never fear. Stiller says not to be surprised if Meara’s the one heckling him from the front row.

“My wife always says, ‘You go on too long. You’ll bore the hell out of people with your stories,’” he says with obvious amusement. “And she always says, ‘It’s always about you.’ Well, of course it’s about me. It’s my show.” Stiller says he’s excited about the opportunity to perform in front of the Richmond Hill audience. The way he sees it,they’re people who probably aren’t much different from him. “They might not be actors or comedians or be on TV, but I think they’ll relate to the stories of my life,” he says.

He is also looking forward to being back in Toronto, where he made the movie Hairspray. “Toronto is one of the best cities in the world. It’s especially great for entertainment, for shows and concerts and plays,” he says. “And the mentality is better than in the U.S., in terms of how people think. What you call ‘health care,’we call ‘socialism’.” At age 83, Stiller is at the peak of his popularity. He credits Seinfeld and King of Queens with turning his career into a phoenix rising from Arizona (as Frank Costanza would say). “I’ve been on what you’d call a hot streak,” he says, matterof- factly.

But it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, there were a lot of lean years before he became a pop culture icon.

The oldest of three children, Stiller grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the Depression.He tells the story of being so poor that during Passover his family would show up at relatives’homes unannounced.“We were seder crashers,” he says.

His bus driver father would often take him to Vaudeville shows and he caught the acting bug early on — he recalls one of his earliest roles was playing Hitler in a comedy — and took acting classes with the likes of Steve McQueen and Charles Nelson Reilly.

When he told his father he wanted to be an actor, his father suggested he become a stagehand instead because at least it was a steady gig. Undaunted, Stiller made ends meet by selling ice cream, washing windows and mixing cement.

He studied drama at the University of Syracuse and made his professional acting debut in a theatrical production of The Silver Whistle opposite Burgess Meredith of Rocky fame. He joined the Compass Players, an improv troupe that would later become Second City, where he met Meara. The couple married and began touring the club circuit and Stiller eventually found himself on Broadway in shows like Hurlyburly, The Ritz, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Guys and Dolls.

A Stiller & Meara sitcom fizzled.

Seinfeld was in its fifth season when Stiller joined the cast, replacing another actor as George’s father. “I didn’t even know who Jerry Seinfeld was. I wasn’t the first choice for Frank Costanza; I wasn’t the first choice for King of Queens, either,” he says with mock indignation. “I’m never the first choice.”

Originally, Stiller was to play Costanza as a meek, henpecked husband who continually bore the brunt of his shrill wife’s outrage.

But Stiller quickly realized that playing the character that way would get him fired, “just like the last guy,”he says.

So he suggested playing the character his way. When Estelle Harris, who played his wife Estelle Costanza, began shrieking at him, he bellowed back. Frank Costanza was born.

Seinfeld and King of Queens may be behind him — although the reruns play endlessly — but Stiller says he’s just getting started. He’s re-teamed with his wife for a series of two-minute segments in which the couple discuss whatever’s on their minds and bicker.

The bits are viewable on the couple’s website, stillerandmeara.com.

“We’ve invaded cyberspace,” he says. “We get to talk about whatever we want — baseball, politics, Lady Gaga. The show is produced and directed by a young fella named Ben Stiller. He’s a smart guy and I think he’s got a bright future ahead of him.”