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Good news to share with you, the loyal Defamer readership, on this Tuesday night. We are excited to announce a new addition to the Defamer staff, Miss Tricia Romano. Broadly speaking, Tricia will be filing an item or so a day for us, focusing mainly on the cultural and nightlife beat. But instead of me prattling on, I'll turn it over to Tricia to introduce herself...

Hi. I'm Tricia Romano. I moved to Los Angeles four months ago from New York, a city I famously loathed, where I spent 8 years in the trenches at the Village Voice. I wrote the nightlife column, "Fly Life", for five of those years, and have the damaged liver to prove it. I also wrote features and cover stories for the paper, one of which won an award. I grew up in Las Vegas (no, we didn’t have slot machines in our classrooms), and lived in Seattle when it was trendy (i.e. after Nirvana broke) where I wrote for both the Stranger and the Seattle Weekly, and was an unabashed raver, before moving to New York. Since I am brand, spanking new to L.A., I have not yet soured on this whole spending-hours-of-your-life-in-traffic thing, and am excited to have summer all year long, and concur with Randy Newman: I love L.A.! I am currently living by the beach, and scraping up a living by penning articles for Radar, the Advocate, and MTV, among others. You can also find me hooking on Main Street.

And with that, please give Tricia a warm and rousing welcome!

[Photo Credit: Nikola Taminzdic]