PARKER POSEY IS looking for her laundry ticket. And opening her mail. And chewing gum. And dragging on her fourth Marlboro of the morning.

"Oh, this woman butchered my eyebrows. Butchered them!" the 26-year-old actress groans about a recent depilatory disaster as she applies makeup. She's wearing a red silk robe with red platform shoes that reveal blue toenails. The star of the movie "Party Girl" just returned from a shoot in Austin, Tex., and can't find her slippers.

Throughout the conversation, Posey bustles around her kitsch-cluttered floorthrough, often interrupting herself midsentence with exclamations or to sing along with the best-of-the-'80s lineup she has going on the stereo.

"Fernando!'' she suddenly bursts out in time with ABBA. Then, back to the interview: "I'll tell you the truth or I'll lie. I don't have anything to hide but a bunch of dirty clothes."

Named after '50s supermodel Suzy Parker, Posey was born in Baltimore, and moved around with her mother and twin brother while her father was in Vietnam, finally settling in Laurel, Miss.

"I was constantly bouncing and doing tricks and stuff," Posey explains, meticulously cutting an allergy pill in half with a large knife. "When we were 3 years old, the doctor observed my brother and me and said, 'Your children are going to be retarded.'" Then throwing her hands up in the air, she exclaims, "AND WE ARE!!"

Though her parents are conservative Catholic folk, they were supportive when Posey set out to make it as an actress. She has been working steadily since 1991, when she landed a role on "As the World Turns" during her senior year at SUNY Purchase. While on the soap, Posey was cast as the tyrannical high school senior Darla in Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused." Since then she has appeared in such indie films as Hal Hartley's "Amateur," Rory Kelly's "Sleep With Me" and Gregg Araki's "Doom Generation." This fall she'll be in Noel Baumbach's Gen-X film, "Kicking and Screaming."

"It's just a hang out, that's all films are," Posey says. "You're sitting next to the camera, and taking a nap next to a bunch of cables, and getting stepped over and stuff. Especially with low budget movies, it's all about that group effort."

Posey is ready for her close-up. Sporting a red sundress and plenty of blue eyeshadow she clambers out the window onto "the verandah"–scaffolding in front of her building. Smiling and waving like a homecoming queen, she calls out to passers-by, "I'm running for mayor of the block! Please vote for me!"

In "Party Girl," Posey plays Mary, a modern-day Holly Golightly torn between her nights as a club diva and her days as a librarian trainee–trying to drum up as much passion for the Dewey Decimal System as she has for designer clothes and the handsome corner falafel vendor.

Although she possesses a frenetic energy similar to Mary's, Posey also has a quiet side. She likes to spend time alone–writing, cruising the Internet or just "hanging out." She's drafted a screenplay, "Dumb in Love," a "psychological comedy melodrama,'' for which she's courting Keanu Reeves.

Posey is now singing along with the Thompson Twins as she throws things into her red vinyl knapsack. She has a meeting this afternoon with director Milos Forman. Tonight is a cast reading for Julian Schnabel's film about painter Jean-Michel Basquiat in which she plays art dealer Mary Boone to David Bowie's Andy Warhol.

Posey still hasn't located her laundry ticket. "I'll have to pull the old, 'I brought it here yesterday, it's in a flowered bag,'" she says sweetly. And she's off.