Beauty and the bust

BEFORE TINKERBELL, Paris Hilton's Chihuahua accessory on the red carpet, there was Frisbee.

Who?

Frisbee, an adorable mini-rex bunny paraded around Drexel University's campus by then-freshman Jocelyn S. Kirsch.

The rabbit was usually wrapped in a blanket inside her oversized handbag.

Kirsch, a graphic-arts and pre-med major when she arrived in 2003 at Drexel, kept the bunny inside her ninth-floor room at the Towers, the freshman dorm. She took him to some of her graphic- arts classes, said a classmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"She did really adore that rabbit, but I think she adored the attention it got her and the company," said a former dorm mate from that year who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Jocelyn's roommate had moved out because they hadn't gotten along, the dorm mate said.

"She was seeking reinforcement. Frisbee gave her that attention she really wanted," she said. "She thought approval came in the form of attention."

Carrying the rabbit around made her stand out and that was what Jocelyn Sarah Kirsch always aimed for, said some of her former friends at Drexel.

The Penelope character from NBC's "Saturday Night Live" - the woman played by Kristen Wiig who twists her hair and tries to one-up anyone she encounters - seemed to be the 22-year-old's alter-ego.

Kirsch told new friends that she was born in Lithuania, that she spoke several languages and that her eyes were purple. She said she had qualified for the U.S. Olympic pole-vaulting trials and had trained at the University of Pennsylvania. Both her parents were plastic surgeons, she said.

When the Florida-born senior was arrested last week along with her live-in love, Edward K. Anderton, on charges of identity theft and burglary, the lies all came crumbling down.

And if they weren't immediately disproven - she wore violet contacts, her mother is a nurse and she didn't make the Olympic trials - her stories were all now considered moot by many in the Drexel community.

"If she was a normal college student, went to school in North Carolina, moved up here, lived in a trashy college house like everyone else and wore regular clothes from Forever 21 and H&M like everyone else in college . . . I would have loved her, just as much if not probably more," said one former friend who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

"She didn't need to have Prada," she said, referring to the high-end label.

Another classmate shook her head. "Everything she told us was a complete lie," the student said. "It's totally unnecessary."

Jocelyn told this classmate and others that her boyfriend had a doctorate in economics. The classmates didn't believe her and eventually one asked Anderton and he replied, "No, I don't."

The consensus among the students was, "We can't f------ trust her," recalled the student. "It's too much for one person."

Jocelyn told them her brother was a captain in the Army and was in Iraq, where he was injured by an improvised explosive device, the student said. "We'd joke that her mother was the surgeon general and her father was president of the United States."

Another friend who also spoke on condition of anonymity recalled when she invited Jocelyn to her home last year - and the curvy chameleon was caught in a lie.

"My parents were asking her questions," said the former friend. Jocelyn told them she spoke 10 different languages and began to name them, Turkish, Czech, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, when the friend interrupted.

The Arabic-language student asked doubtfully, "Arabic, really?"

"Arabic," Jocelyn said with certainty, the former friend recalled.

"Then, it clicked in her head that I spoke Arabic. She quickly changed and said 'I mean I speak Africaan,'" the classmate said. "If she spoke Arabic, she clearly would have told me beforehand." *