interview by Marcus Waldron
photos by CJ Harker

What are you up to today? You’re at work?
Yeah, I’m on break. I work at an herb shop in Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia. I got into herbs when I tore my ACL. I had a bunch of health issues and I really feel like they help me, so I like to inform other people about the healing benefits.

What are the main ways people use herbs for health? What kind of things do you recommend to people?
Teas and tinctures are awesome. You could look up an herb shop in your area and get some loose leaf teas and just boil and steep ‘em and drink ‘em daily. The tinctures I think are more potent. They’re more convenient on the go, and they work great. A lot of herbs are anti-inflammatory, and good for your immune system. A lot of them don’t have side effects, so more and more people are turning to this holistic method because they’re getting frustrated with pharmaceutical companies.

How long have you been skating? How did you get into it?
I started skating in maybe 2002, so it’s been about 23 years now. The first handful of years was just riding around the neighborhood with my friends, not really learning any tricks. I think it took a couple years to learn how to ollie, and then everything progressed really quickly from that. I started skating with my best friend, James Pitonyak. We grew up on the same street, and we went through every phase together. We did bikes, scooting, and then we found skateboarding and we just got hooked on it and never turned back. So me, James, and the neighborhood kids would meet up and skate in the back of this QuickChek in our neighborhood. We started skating flat, waxing ledges, and Bondo-ing stuff. I don’t even know how James learned to do that, maybe from some older kids in the neighborhood.

How old were you when you were Bondo-ing stuff?
Probably like 16. James was definitely a go-getter. We also had an older squad that we were skating with. I grew up ten minutes from downtown Trenton, like the brick bank spot. So we used to take the bus down there and skate downtown Trenton all the time. There used to be a crew down there, it was like Dave Klama, Rob Wikowski, Joe Rogers, and Chris Davis. We looked up to all those guys. Super baggy pants, small wheels, marble ledges, crusty spots, that was my introduction to skating. And of course, it was kind of like the Zero era too. When I was 15, I ollied the nine stair downtown. My friends would make me huck. They would talk shit to me. “What are you afraid to break a nail?” I was the only girl in the squad, so I had to take some shit. It was all out of love. They wouldn’t make me do shit that I didn’t want to do.

What’s the craziest trick you’ve seen James do?
Behind the QuickChek growing up there was a grass gap, and a truck had pulled up to the gap. James put a barricade down the grass gap. We tried to push it into the grass, we tried to support it, and put stuff around it to hold it down. But James came off the back of the truck and back smith grinded this rail over the grass gap that he made. It was all sketchy and kind of leaning. That was probably one of the craziest. We were probably only 15 at the time. Or that line where he does the nollie heel and then nosegrind down the Trenton 13.

When did you start going to Philly?
We used to take the River Line down to Philly when we were 15 or 16. I started going to Philly kind of early on, but I got hurt later that year, I was pretty young. I was filming something with Pat Guidotti. So this lady in my area opened up a skateshop called Extreme Function. We would meet up there. She had a son who skated and then it was Alex York, Chris Tams, Ishod, me, James, and Dylan Constantine started coming around too. So we had a crew. None of us drove at the time, but the older guys like Pat Guidotti would pick us up and he would take us up to New York. He would take us to street spots and film. I was filming something with him for a video for the skateshop, because I was trying to get sponsored by them. It was my first real injury, I just rolled my ankle super bad. They said I was going to be out for six months, but at the time I was 15 and it’s all I did, I thought it was the end of the world. I was already smoking a little bit of weed, and then this kid in my neighborhood brought pills around. Then I ate mushrooms for the first time, this was all while I was 15, but the mushrooms had ecstasy in the chocolate bar too. He also showed us how to snort pills. Then basically, when my foot healed up, I stopped caring so much about skating. I got pretty into the party scene. And I just basically became a full blown drug addict by the age of 16. I was getting arrested at school for selling pills, and the cops were at my house constantly. I lived at James’s house for a while after my mom kicked me out, but then James’s mom kicked me out after four months. Long story short, fast forward, I was 21 going into my third rehab, and my mom was like, you can’t come back here when you get out. I ended up moving into a halfway house in Levittown. I bounced around recovery houses for a little bit because I couldn’t stay sober. I kept relapsing and getting kicked out, and then something changed in me. I just was so tired and I just wanted, I don’t know… something changed. I stayed at my last halfway house for a year and a half. I lived with 15 women. And then I went to the local skateshop, which was five minutes away, and I got a board. It was Reign Skate Shop. Then I went to the local skatepark, and met a bunch of new homies. I still could skate somehow. They were like, “Yo come meet up at the skateshop with us Saturday mornings, we hit spots on the weekends.” I moved out of the halfway house, went into a sober house, and I lived there for four years. I rented a room from this older couple I met in AA, and I just got fully addicted to skateboarding. That’s all wanted to do. I didn’t care that I was young and couldn’t drink. I didn’t care about any of that. All I wanted to do was skate. They started bringing me to the indoor skate park X Park and then going down to Love Park. And that’s basically how I ended up in PA.

So how long have you been living in Philly?
I was waitressing and then I started going back to school, because I was tired of waitressing and I thought maybe I would do X-ray tech. So I was going to school full-time as an X-ray tech, and I was working full time, and then I was commuting down to Love Park and skating from 10:00 pm to 4:00 am like four days a week. You could only skate there after 10:00 pm because of the bike cops. So I was finishing up school and I got tired of the commute of driving down there four days a week. So I moved down to Philly in 2017, eight years ago. As soon as I moved down here though, I tore my ACL and didn’t skate for a year and a half. I feel like almost everything that I’ve done and filmed in skating has been after my ACL surgery. So I guess I came back stronger. It still bothers me every day. That’s why I am really into the herb stuff, so I can keep skating as long as I can. Anything good for my knees, I’ll do it. Acupuncture, all that shit.

Were you skating at all during that time?
In my addiction, I wasn’t really skating at all, just because I’m very extreme, I’m all or nothing. When I’m doing something, I’m really doing it. So I was just really doing fucking drugs and alcohol and I was not skating at all, unfortunately, but I was still hanging out at James’s house. I remember Dylan and James trying to get me out multiple times. I would just be laying in James’s bed in his room and they were going out to go skate Princeton or go skate downtown, and they would try to get me out, and I was just so sick and weak. Just a totally different person.

How did you end up getting involved with Traffic?
So hyped about that. Jake Todd hit me up and asked me if I would want to ride for Traffic in 2022. I was getting boards from Terror of Planet X, a local Philly company. At first, when he asked me, I said no, because I was pretty bummed on my skating at the time. It was 2022 and I was 32, but I just didn’t feel like I had much left I could squeeze out of myself. I just didn’t want the pressure of having to film when I wasn’t feeling good on my board. But then it came up again a few months later, and without hesitation, I was like “Yes, dude. I want to ride for Traffic.” I just pictured myself in a couple years doing what I always do when I look back on shit, beating myself up about it. I was like, I’m going to regret this decision if I don’t just take a chance and see what comes of it. Then I started filming with Jake who lives in my area. He was already filming a bunch of my friends, so it was really easy. It felt very natural. They were working on the last video It’s Completely Fine. I think they were two years into filming it, so I just jumped in on that.

How long were you filming for that video?
Two years, but then I had a work injury in the middle of filming for it. I was making food at a cafe and the refrigerator fell on my foot and broke three bones. That took four months to heal, but the deadline kept getting pushed back for the video, so it was okay. It worked it out, but I should have had more shit in it, whatever.

What’s your approach to filming? Do you try to plan stuff out a lot or do you kind of just go out and see what happens?
Both. I love the spontaneous clips. The best clips are when I’m out on the missions with no expectations because I don’t know what spots we’re going to, so I don’t have anything planned out. That’s my favorite, but that’s not really the approach that I take, unfortunately. I have many lists, and they keep getting longer because I keep going back to spots and not getting shit, and then I just keep it on the list. I plan stuff that I want to film. I try to keep it kind of loose. There are definitely specific tricks at specific spots that I think about all the time, that I want to get. It’s usually something that’s kind of hard or scary or something that I battled before. Sometimes I go visit the spot not even with my board, I’ll just go look at it from time to time. Usually I have an idea and a trick that I want to do because I think of how it’ll look when it’s being filmed. It just gives me a feeling like “I want to do that”. I feel excited about it, or I’m like that’ll look cool, or that might hype somebody up, or maybe it’ll inspire some chick that sees it to get into the streets or something.

Who were the pro skaters you were looking up to back then, and were there any girl skaters that you were skating with or looked up to?
There were no other girls. I’d travel the tri-state area, we would just go up to New York, go to Philly, and there were no girls skating in my area. I used to get made fun of in school all the time, and that’s funny because now skating is so cool and every chick wants to do it, but in high school it was terrible. I did meet this girl who I’m pretty sure was getting boards from 5boro at the time. Her name was Lorena Lima. I think she rode for NJ too back in the day. I met her at Brooklyn Banks, probably when I was like 15. I tried to meet up with her a couple of times going up to New York. It kind of fizzled out. She was the first girl I saw in person who was skating, grinding rails and boxes, and flipping her board. It was awesome. It was motivating. Other than that, I used to watch a lot of Elissa Steamer, Jaime Reyes, and Vanessa Torres. We went to the local skate shop and got a video called Getting Nowhere Faster, It’s an all female skate video. I think it came out in 2004 or 2005. That was the first all women skate video I saw where I was like, wow there are women out there getting it. They’re filming, and they’re skating just like the dudes, they got their own squad, they’re hitting street spots and they’re eating shit. I was like, that’s fucking awesome.

Have you heard any updates on the new Muni plans? Are you excited?
Yeah, I’m super excited. Pat Heid has been going to all the meetings, and he’s basically why I think things have progressed. I’m pretty sure he totally went out of his way and did all these things to get through to the city why it’s so important for us to have that as a safe space to skate, and just all the culture of skateboarding. I know others helped too but he’s done a lot. I’m not sure of all of the details, but I know that what happened in Sweden, got their attention. They saw how important Love Park was and how iconic it was. I think them spending all that money shipping and rebuilding it in another country got their attention. The thing I’m most excited about is they’re going to put in a granite domino. I think four of the Muni benches and two of the city hall benches, I believe, I’m not sure actually what the exact plans were. I’m super grateful for the people who are pushing for our skateboarding future here in Philadelphia.

Any last words on recovery or addiction?
I’m very open and I did want to talk about the sobriety thing. I know so many people that struggle with it. There are resources, you have to just keep on building up your toolbox with stuff. The opposite of addiction is connection, and the head doesn’t want you to connect to people. You got to put light into the dark places of your mind, and that’s what gives you the freedom and allows healing to begin. But none of us have to go through it alone. You just talk about it, find your resources, build your toolbox of coping skills. I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it wasn’t for getting sober. It all happened at the right time. My mom being like, you can’t come back here. And then going to Levittown. I didn’t know anything about Reign Skateshop because I fell off from skating for those years. Luckily my addiction was really only 14 to 22. I got that out the way. But I fell off into trying drinking in my 30s, and then had to stop again. Skating or really getting into your passions helps me not to self destruct and stay fired up. It takes work everyday.