Natalie McDonald

LCHS and LVC for those in the know.

Magazine Editor

The ACLU keeps sending me membership cards.

Art, books, blue jeans, turtlenecks, red wine, well-written poetry, fire escapes, postcards, potted plants, pop art, horror movies, eating cheese, magazines, sketchbooks, music, dogs, disco, dingy corner bars, the city, book covers, coffee breaks, Sunday brunch, Bloody Marys, a gin fizz, peculiarities, passenger trains, television, brussel sprouts, allegory, peppermint gum, iPod, posting mail, lead paragraphs, a good hunch, long drives, napping well, reading in bed, drying gesso, daily chronicles, journals, history, an epiphany and New England any time at all.

Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac, Marcel Proust, Milan Kundera, Harold Brodkey, Joseph Brodsky, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, Rilke, Ted Hughes and Sylvia, Capote, M. Duras, Sartre, Camus, Rushdie, Baudelaire, Cheever, Didion, Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Barthes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Pedro Paramo, ' Genet, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Isherwood, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, May Sarton, Camille Paglia, Frank O'Hara, Dylan Thomas, Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Douglas Coupland, Tony Kushner, Allen Ginsberg, Garcia Lorca, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Djuna Barnes, Simone de Beauvoir, Augusten Burroughs, Paul Monnette, Toni Morrisson, William Burroughs, 'City of Night, ' Quentin Crisp, John Berryman, Lytton Strachey, Dorothy Parker, Roethke, Andre Gide, Reynolds Price, James Joyce, Dave Eggers, Neal Pollack, Violette Leduc, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'Headed for the Blues, ' Auden, Hart Crane, Italo Calvino, Harvey Fierstein, Ayn Rand, Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Low

Interiors, Frida, The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys, Carrington, 84 Charing Cross Road, Torch Song Trilogy, Cabaret, old Woody Allen flicks, Home For the Holidays, The Four Seasons, Barefoot in the Park, Basquiat, High Art, Reality Bites, Laurel Canyon, Before Night Falls, The Godfather, or any other movie found on IFC, Bravo and the foreign film dept. starring Catherine Deneuve...

Currently on iPod heavy rotation: Antony and the Johnsons, The Band, The Ditty Bops, Ben Lee, Bee Gees, Bessie Smith, Berlin, The Brunettes, Castanets, Chet Baker, Coco Rosie, The Gossip, Frank Black, Frou Frou, George Gershwin, Iron & Wine, Judy Garland, Kanye West, Leadbelly, Jeff Buckley, John Coltrane, John Cale, John Lee Hooker, The Killers, Laurel Canyon, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, Madonna, Melanie, Leslie and the Ly's, Magnetic Fields, Maria Callas, New Order, Nilsson, Nina Simone, Oasis, Morrissey, The Mountain Goats, Natalie Merchant, Nico, Nilsson, Paper Lace, Peaches, Peggy Lee, Pet Shop Boys, Pernice Brothers, Pogues, The Postal Service, Pete Yorn, Peter Allen, P.J. Harvey, Prince, Pulp, Radiohead, Rainbow Brown, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, The Raveonettes, Rolling Stones, Rufus Wainwright, Ryan Adams, Saint Etienne, Scissor Sisters, Spoon, Simon & Garfunkel, Sondre Lerche, Stephen Merritt, Verve, Tom Waits, The White Stripes, Whiskeytown...

Law & Order, Arrested Development, Queer as Folk, CSI Las Vegas, The Golden Girls, The L Word, BBC, CBS Sunday Morning and LOGO. I love LOGO.

Please check out my photos here for factual evidence of my everyday life: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzfaustus/

For things you may not know:

I could spend a Sunday afternoon in the Cy Twombly room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I once squirted perfume at the mall for 10 dollars an hour. I attended a small liberal arts college in a one-traffic-light town. I was one credit short of having a second major in philosophy. I could eat the same sandwich every day for a week. I prefer the sound of the city to my top 10 playlists. I view summer as a sad season. I cut my own hair, dislike going to the bank or doing laundry. I like having a dishwasher. I usually read three books at a time. I enjoy looking at religious icon paintings and homoerotic photography. I'm a vegetarian. I don't like leaving the house without my lipstick. I don't know how to swim. I never tire of a Billie Holiday album. I'm an only child. I hate flying, but love long car trips. I miss driving nowhere on backroads at home hoping to get somewhere. I'm a dull dresser. I've owned the same watch since I was 16. I'll never marry, miss having lunch with my mother and find myself dropping everything to watch thunderstorms.

I'd like to have dinner with Phillip Roth and Edmund White tonight.