Photograph: Jay Muhlin

What are you up to?
I’m distributing my zine. My friends and I put it together. It’s called Expensive Shit (For Wealthy People).

Wow, that’s so 1990. Didn’t the blog kill the zine a long time ago?
That’s sad. Blogs gave a lot of people independence to self-publish, but it’s still beautiful to create something with your friends and put a lot of love into it.
The Barnard College Library Zine Collection has 543 zines in circulation and about 2,000 in total.

You sound like a poetic character from a novel or something. Which one would you be?
[Laughs] This seems like a trite answer, but possibly Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. She was so flighty.

Are you the love object of an aspiring preppy?
Oh, I don’t know…I’ve been seeing the same person for over three years now and he’s terrific. But recently a friend of mine told me he had very strong feelings for me. I was sort of scared and appalled. And I’m actually bringing him to the opera tomorrow—I’d promised to before all this happened.

The opera?
I work for the New York City Opera, in Development—which is just a fancy word for fund-raising. I hobnob with the people who give us a lot of money.

At 23, is it hard to hold up your end of the conversation with highfalutin people?
Absolutely. But it’s funny how you can talk to them about really dumb stuff like hair and clothes and boys too. They’ll reveal a lot because they have no reason to impress me.

These are the wealthiest people in Manhattan?
Yeah, pretty much. It’s right out of an Edward Gorey drawing.

More thoughts from Dana

“I really admire the styles of the late 1930s through the early 1950s. The silhouettes are so enchanting, they take you away—it’s like applying fantasy to life in the modern day.”

“I have Paul Simon tickets for April 13 at BAM. I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself. I think David Byrne is going to be there, which is out of this world.”

“Opera was created as this really progressive art form of the working class, and then it became this emblem of the upper class and it stagnated. But I see a movement toward celebrating the beautiful music of the 20th century, which there is just oodles and oodles of. That’s something that City Opera is going to be doing when Gerard Mortier becomes our general manager in 2009.”

—Kate Lowenstein

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