My aim in creating the persona of “Poison Oak” was to identify the character traits and advocacy relationship of a drag character who, in the great tradition of other characters that have held this space, could provide a ‘skin’ from which I might be able to enter a world of respected and thought-provoking social/ethnobotany/magickal world edutainment voices. Across my lifetime, I’ve been inspired by Ms. Frizzle (The Magic School Bus), Joey Santore (Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t), Pattie Gonia, Jinkx Monsoon (both drag artists), and Beat Movement authors such as Diane Di Prima, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Bob Kaufman. I wanted to create a character that gave me a way of talking about “hippie” concepts without being dismissed as a Polly Anna stoner—topics like treating plants, animals, and landforms as part of our communities, de-monsterifying real-world bad actors in order to dismiss them from accountability, and understanding “garden therapy” lessons.

I spent a year helping develop and run an eco-therapeutic inpatient treatment center for eating disorders, and went on to gain a horticulture degree where I focused on “listening” to the garden I was tending. It can teach us much about how to interact with other humans, animals, and wild spaces as a whole:  recognizing and meeting the needs of others outside of our own expectations and time table, identifying and responding to non-verbal communication cues to better care for those we share space with, and understanding the larger systems at play that bring our collective environment into harmony—or a poisonous, toxic, or fear-inducing space, like UCSC Prof. Lindsey Dillon writes about in Toxic City: redevelopment and environmental justice in San Francisco. Whether urban or rural, we all share spaces with non-human entities that we vilify and turn into our enemies, and I wanted to provide an interpretive voice, with a deadpan sassy flair, to that message.

I found it very compelling to finally write a sort of “introduction video” as this character who I’ve been considering for so many years. Being able to explain some of the natural plants (the Anacardiaceae family, which includes mangoes, poison ivy, and poison oak) and environmental processes (wildfire, water tables) as this character has helped me consider how to “become” the Ms. Frizzle environmental interpretation voice that I’ve held dormant within myself. It was almost like it was a wildfire-activated seed that sprung into life having the opportunity to take root, get some sunshine on them, and blossom into an actual project.

I’ve been hesitant to practice the “activist + artist” courage that requires confidently speaking on these topics, but was pleasantly surprised at how I was able to take some shaky first steps towards “building a relationship” with a (virtual, non-existent, build-it-and-they-will-come) audience for my discursive little diatribes. I did a couple of rehearsal/edit read-throughs of the script but didn’t edit anything from the video after, and definitely feel like I could improve on tone and delivery to make the message I’m conveying a bit more … palatable, but generally was happy with letting the “rough draft/endosperm” version of my characterized self out into this big, scary world. I really hope that together, the character and world can soften and become a little bit more charming together through building a community of humans who want to do better by each other and the inhabitants who can’t speak up for themselves, except by burning us when we overstep on their boundaries.