Life of the Party

DIZ McNALLY IS A LIFE-OF-THE-PARTY PROFESSIONAL and takes her work very seriously, folks. Anyone who has gone to Silver Lake’s annual Sunset Junction Street Fair has no doubt seen her announcing various acts on various stages and generally keeping the attending hordes informed via her rather verbose delivery. You can’t miss her — she’s the blond pigtails-with-butterfly-clips hippie chick with the three-inch multi-colored fingernails and a voice that defies gravity.

Hailing from Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town outside Boston, McNally arrived in Los Angeles to attend USC — “majoring in theater, minoring in waitressing,” she says. “I don’t want to put any years on it, but I landed here not too long ago. I just seem to have always been here.”

After college, McNally did a kids’ TV show on Nickelodeon called Out of Controlfor 12 years, then did a few movies “here and there” as she puts it, and can be seen most days selling magazines in Hollywood at the newsstand on Cahuenga. “I’ve met so many people. I know everybody and I’ve seen them grow up. I’m really lucky that I have a lot of nice friends out here, and now that I’m working at the newsstand, I’ve made a whole lot of new friends — I just really like working with people. I still have people who know me from the TV show, and they come by the newsstand and get their pictures taken with me.”

McNally’s current venture is another kids show called Diz 4 a Day. “I want to be the female Pee-Wee Herman. I love kids, and I’ve worked with them all my life. Kids are the ones who don’t judge me. Kids say, ’Wow, look at those nails! They’re so cool.’ Adults will say, ‘How can you do anything with those nails? Why don’t you cut your nails? Why do you look like that?’?”

That “look” is something this town cannot go without, and the very thought of the city without her makes me dizzy.