GO ORANGE! Serial tanner Patricia Krentcil at the Bloomfield, NJ, Target store yesterday, where she said she was “going to buy extra [tanning] cream.” A HS pal says she was a loon even then (left, in 1983 yearbook photo). (William Farrington)
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Even in high school she was half-baked.
Tanorexic New Jersey mom Patricia Krentcil has been abusing UV rays since at least her freshman year — and a classmate told The Post she was just as nutty back then.
“She was wacky, she was crazy,” said a friend from Cold Spring Harbor HS, where Krentcil spent the 1982-83 school year. “There was just some strangeness about her.”
In a yearbook photo, Krentcil flashed a big smile beneath her supple blond curls — with her skin abnormally dark even for a Long Island beachgoer.
Back then, she was known for experimenting with boys, drugs, alcohol — and yes, tanning.
“I do remember her being on the tan side. She definitely had some color,” said the classmate.
“We would go to the beach, but fake-tanning was never a thing.”
Krentcil was arrested for allegedly taking her then- 5-year-old daughter, Anna, to a local tanning salon — and letting the kindergartner get so sunburned a school nurse had to call the authorities.
She has claimed the girl got sunbaked while gardening.
Her case drew the attention of “Jersey Shore” star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, who called the leathery mom a “crazy b—h.”
Krentcil slapped back at the trashy TV star yesterday, calling her “the biggest a-hole in the world. She’s fake, she’s fat, her [breasts] are fake — she’s disgusting!”
“When this is all said and done, I’d like to meet up with ‘Snoopy,’ ” she added.
Snooki refused to comment.
Free on $25,000 bail, Krentcil spent another day staggering around Nutley, slurring her words and repeatedly claiming she is a “great mom.”
She dropped by a lawyer’s office in Bloomfield and went shopping at Target, where she looked at dresses for young girls.
When asked if she was getting any tanning supplies, she told a reporter, “I’m going to buy extra [tanning] cream.”
Krentcil later watered the grass outside her modest home and washed the family van, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and a short ruffled skirt that left little to the imagination.
“She is a nutjob,” said a former clerk at Kelly’s Liquor Store, where Krentcil and her husband buy three-gallon jugs of wine two or three times a week.
“Every time she was in, it was like she was on something,” added the clerk, who no longer works at the store.
Camden County court officials yesterday said Krentcil is no longer on probation on a 2000 conviction for credit-card theft, forgery and theft for writing bad checks.
A warrant went out for her arrest in 2001 after she failed to appear at a probation hearing. She paid $4,000 restitution to settle the case last month.
That same year, Krentcil filed for bankruptcy as she racked up 22 different liens or judgements against her. But, she says, it’s everybody’s fault but her own.
“It’s all my ex-husband!” she claimed yesterday.