Catholic school graduate and college dropout Antonella Barba says she’s going to stay in LA for “a week or two” to see if she can quickly carve some sort of respectable career out of her failed American Idol bid. Barba should have realized that dirty personal pictures can work to your advantage if you’re careful about it, as is evidenced by Paris’ delicate balance between massive overexposure and do-nothing fame.

She claims she’s not going to take advantage of two very lucrative offers from different adult film companies. SugarDVD, which is like Netflix for porn, has offered her half a million to be their poster girl while Girls Gone Wild wants to pay a quarter million to have her host one of their drunken boob faux-lesbian makeout fests. She’s also not going to pose nude, despite the fact that we’ve already seen most of her.

It seems like she would be a natural to me, and who can turn down that kind of money for nothing? Barba can, and she wants you to know about it. That Catholic school guilt runs deep, but only deep enough to want to protect her public image, not the one all her friends and boyfriends know about.

Barba, 20, attended Roman Catholic grammar school in neighboring Point Pleasant Beach, and went to a Catholic high school in nearby Red Bank before enrolling in Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she studied architecture.

She withdrew earlier this year to focus on the “Idol” competition, and has no plans to go back anytime soon.

“Right now, I’m going to stay in L.A. for a week or two,” she said. “I want to see what I can do with this for a career. I want to strike while the iron is hot.”

Barba, who played the violin as a youth and gave lessons to neighborhood children, said she would consider acting or modeling, but still wants a career in music above all else.

She said she will reject any prurient career offers that come her way. Nor, she added, would she pose nude, or in partial clothing, for any reason.

“That is not the way I want to present myself,” she said. “I keep getting told no publicity is bad publicity. Yes, it’s true my name is more well-known because of it. But I’m not known for the things I want to be known for. I’d rather present myself in a more classy way.”

Residents in Point Pleasant, a Jersey shore town of 18,000 about 60 miles north of Atlantic City, supported Barba when news of the photos threatened to overshadow her appearances on the show.

Signs sprouted around town wishing her well. By Friday morning, however, they were gone, replaced with messages advertising youth baseball sign-ups, and even the imminent arrival of spring.

She’s not going to be able to extend her fifteen minutes much longer. These “scandals” have a shelf life of up to two weeks, and hers is already getting sour. Maybe if she upped the ante a little bit by posing nude she could wheedle her way into the public’s long-term memory, but she’s already ruled that out.

Here are some pictures of Antonella I haven’t seen yet, from Gambling911.com.

And here are some of the pictures that kept Antonella on Idol too long: