O’Day cures ills of arrival in LV

Two Sundays ago, Aubrey O'Day went to an emergency room for the first of three ER trips in a week, she says. She felt terribly ill and run-down. She had worked a lot before arriving in Vegas. Then came a marathon of rehearsals for "Peepshow." And emotionally, a photo scandal had taken a toll.

"They had me on a breathing machine. It was intense. I'm never sick," O'Day tells me, stretched out under a throw, still coughing, on a chaise lounge in her suite at Planet Hollywood Resort.

The ER doctor told O'Day she had "very strong bronchitis" and put her on antibiotics.

And he asked, to the effect: "Did your tantrum-throwing Peep Diva come back to work yet?"

"I'm the Peep Diva," O'Day, 25, responded. (Peep Diva is her character's name.)

The doctor said he had read nasty blogs about her.

"I was heartbroken," O'Day says now, laughing lightly in retrospect. "This was such a bad way to start out in Vegas because I'm such a nice person, and I'm so excited to be here, and all these things are being said."

Here's what the photo scandal and gossip was about: Hours after O'Day debuted in "Peepshow" a few weeks ago, Perez Hilton pointed online to photos of O'Day taken by someone in the audience.

Perez alluded to her curvy body. He's dubbed her "shady" and a "quitter" for pulling out of a performance after his harsh post. The day I interviewed her in her suite, on Friday, O'Day (who has posed in Playboy) posted a photo via Twitter of her bending over in a thong on a bed in that suite. Then, Perez declared her a "Skank" again.

The former Danity Kane singer -- a lifelong singer and dancer discovered on MTV's "Making the Band" who since has done Broadway -- responded to Perez by posting a video online.

At one point in the video she appeared shirtless in a see-through bra, to prove the Perez photos were just bad photos. (Having seen her in the topless show and up close, I agree.) And she chided society for making women feel bad about their bodies.

"It's a very hard thing to fight an article written by an ignorant person in an ignorant manner," she tells me.

"I'll never know why he chooses to like somebody over something else," she says. "I really don't care. He has no bearing as to why I wanted to be in this career, or why I'm here."

She does know he ruined her introduction to Vegas.

"We had this great show. Everything went amazing," including a VH1 reality-TV crew in tow. "My entire family was here. It was one of the best nights. ... The house was sold-out.

"And then I come home, and the first (press) was Perez Hilton, saying: Oh look ... they brought this 'downgrade' to Vegas. This is a joke."

Perez's online comments made things tough for O'Day before she even got here.

"The first thing you'll see" on the reality-TV show "is the cast comes up and says, 'Well, I saw on Perez, you had your boobs out, he said you're a skank,'" she says. "I get all those questions right out of the gate -- instead of starting where I am as a person."

O'Day stands by the spirited video she released in reply.

"A lot of celebrities work very hard at showing we're tough, and you can't be weak to be in this industry, and you can't cry. You can't be a baby. You have to suck it up. You have to keep going.

"But it's OK to show people. I had a rough time, and this is how (Perez) made me feel, and this is how I learned from it."

She doesn't read Perez, she says, but people inform her of his negative slants.

"I just think to myself, 'How silly.' All the hard work and what this experience really is -- it's hard to know people will read a bad perspective of it and think that's the reality -- even that doctor."

By the way, she turned that ER doctor around, she says.

"He was like, 'Well, you're a really nice girl! I don't know why any of that was said.'"

Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.