There was something familiar about her voice even before she identified herself.

Marie Silvia

"Hi, Tony," the woman said with a casual intimacy you don't hear too often from strangers. Even though I was listening to a message left minutes earlier on my office voice mail, I could almost feel sunlight bursting through the phone lines all the way from Los Angeles.

"My name is Marie Silvia," she said. "I came across an article you wrote called 'Make it a Super Sunday, Levitra girl," she said in a voice both girlish and effervescent. I knew where things were headed and smiled in sweet anticipation.

"And," she said slowing down for dramatic effect, "I am the girl in the Levitra spot." My first thought upon hearing that was how much she actually sounded like the coquettish woman in the ad, down to the slight catch in her voice.

"I found your article amusing and I just wanted to chat for a few minutes," she said.

What could I say? Obviously, when the Levitra girl calls, you drop everything. The last thing I expected when I wrote the column last month was a call from her.

Instead of returning her call immediately, I ran around the office bragging that I finally had the Levitra girl's digits. My male colleagues understood immediately, but my female coworkers were unimpressed and vaguely annoyed that I considered a call from an actress currently starring in an erectile dysfunction campaign some kind of journalistic coup.

It took four hours for me to get back to work.

When we finally hooked up for an interview earlier this week, I knew quite a bit about Marie Silvia thanks to a piece that ran in The Wall Street Journal last year that referred to her as "Queen Levitra."

Silvia, 44, has been doing commercials, stage work and bit parts in television and movies for 25 years. Many will recognize her as "the girl from the Home Shopping Network," a Miller Lite beer ad with racer Rusty Wallace and an Ex-Lax commercial she's in no hurry to talk about except to say, "it's classy." But it took erectile dysfunction to make the Juilliard-trained beauty an iconic presence on television.

"Every actress dreams of getting a job like this," she said. "It's high visibility and it's a good acting part, too. I don't think a whole day has passed since the commercials have aired that I haven't talked about it in some capacity. When I was at the gym Friday, I'd already had three conversations about it before noon."

Even "Saturday Night Live" weighed in with a satire of the ad in its season opener. "It's so hysterical. The girl [Amy Poehler] is wearing a white shirt, just like I did in the Levitra ad. A friend in the Midwest called to tell me it was coming on," Silvia said.

The married mother of an 11-year-old is glad to be a part of the pop culture conversation, even if it's in a way she never imagined.

"Not everyone can talk about male impotence," she said with a laugh when asked how she got the gig. "Me, it just rolled off my tongue. I had no problem talking about it. During the screen test, they would up the ante to see if I could handle it. What won them over was that I could talk about it like it was everyday conversation."

As the first woman spokesperson for a male impotence drug, Silvia was already a sensation before the first ad actually ran. Given her identification with the product, you'd think Levitra would stick with her through thick and thin. Alas, Levitra informed Silvia this week that it was "going in another direction" and wouldn't be using her anymore.

"Levitra switched ad agencies," Silvia said without a hint of rancor. She'll move on to something else with nothing but fond memories of an ad that made her famous.

Her husband is very secure about it, she insists. Most men keep their infatuation to themselves when he's around.