Who is Dr. Nutmeg?
For Free Subscribers: The origin story behind our Latina mad scientist whose surname isn't Spanish.
Corrections are in order! Last week, I included a cute Zoom screenshot of the Latino.com 25th anniversary alumnae reunion and accidentally dated it Aug. 2, 2004. Zoom obviously didn’t exist in 2004! The correct date of our virtual reunion was Aug 2, 2024. You’ll see the incorrect version in your email while the link on the website has been corrected.
I also wrote that Macarena Hernández is from McAllen, Tx., but she’s actually living in Edinburg, and she’s originally from La Joya, Tx. Apologies for these mistakes, but hey — they happen and that’s what corrections are for. :)
And now…back to the question of the night: Who is Dr. Nutmeg?
When I first started shooting scenes for a “Latinas in Tech” TV series in 2010, many of my film school classmates at American University in Washington, DC asked:
Who is Dr. Nutmeg?
How is she related to The Femmebots?
If Dr. Nutmeg is Latina, why isn’t her surname Spanish?
Great questions! At the time, I could only tell my classmates:
The Femmebots are a team of seven female robots.
Dr. Nutmeg is the one who programmed the Femmebots with “Latina” code.
Dr. Nutmeg and The Femmebots work together at a tech startup called The FACTory in a futuristic, underwater Miami.
The Femmebots “shoot” ideas at the sharks and vulture capitalists from their “Boob Tubes.” Ya know…like bullets from their bras in Austin Powers.
And then everyone would laugh while also feeling WAY confused by all the characters and pretentious feminist social commentary. It was only natural that they would ask a bunch of follow-up questions like:
Why is The FACTory spelled that way?
WHY did Dr. Nutmeg program these Femmebots?
Is Dr. Nutmeg a Femmebot, too?
WHY were Dr. Nutmeg and The Femmebots battling the sharks and vulture capitalists?
WHO are these sharks and vulture capitalists, anyways?
Uhhh, didn’t I just answer all those questions visually in my film? Haha. No. Everyone would always be like, “Looks cool…but I don’t get it.” Sigh. Admittedly, it was all still very CONCEPTUAL in my own head because the STORY had yet to be fleshed out.
As it turns out, therapy helped me understand my characters.
Since I was about 8 years old, characters started popping into my head. There was Mrs. Lanny, the bus driver with a big butt. Marga was the girl who lived on the other side of the mirror saying silly things like, “Ooooh, you got the same name I’ve got!” They were imaginary friends for a lonely kid who didn’t fit very well into a big Latino family. I was “weird.” “Eccentric.” “Annoying.”
Many years later, when I was about 33 and going through a “come to Jesus” kind of awakening from taking too many yoga classes at the Standard Hotel in Miami, I created Chakra Girl, a “yoga superhero” character who could harness the power of the seven chakras to defeat the “bad guys” of shady Miami. The problem was that she was just a “beam of light.” She needed a costume, or avatar in the real world, so that’s how The Femmebots came along. They were empty shells with computerized brains that became “animated” by Chakra Girl’s light. And thus “Femmebot” became my nickname while working at a tech startup full of men who thought I was “weird,” eccentric,” and “annoying.”
Therapy taught me that these characters were helping me cope with a world that could not see beyond the costume into which I was born.
So who was Dr. Nutmeg, and how was she helping me?
Dr. Nutmeg helped me cope with jealousy.
It’s only this year, 2024, that I finally understand who Dr. Nutmeg is, and why she popped into my consciousness one Saturday afternoon more than 10 years ago.
According to my “memory files,” I was hanging out with my boyfriend at the time in his posh Dupont Circle apartment. He was talking on the phone while I was working on my laptop. The way he was laughing made me stop typing for a few moments. I caught a vibe. A “flirty” kind of vibe. When he clicked off the phone, this was our basic exchange:
Me: Who was that?
Him: My friend. Meg.
Me (skeptical face): Your friend?
Him: Yeah. She’s a doctor.
Me (with heavy sarcasm): Hmf. Your “friend” Meg. Who is a doctor.
I knew in my gut immediately that this “friend” was either a former lover — or worse — a current lover. Being the super cool, formerly polyamorous girl I once was while I was living in Miami, I unconsciously coped with this information in the way I always did: Disassociate and project the feelings into a fictional character. And thus, our conversation continued, after a beat of silence:
Me: Dr…Nutmeg?
Him: Haha, that’s a great name.
Me: Hmmm. Yeah.
And thus, Dr. Nutmeg was born. Dr. Nutmeg was the name I gave my jealousy toward this woman and all the other women my boyfriend would “juggle” while dating me over the course of three years. I know. Such a dum-dum I was back then. Most women would be like, “Ok, Byeeeee.” But I distinctly remember believing that the key to true feminist freedom from patriarchy was expecting NOTHING from a man. I know. It was just a theory….
Anyways, eventually I started expecting more, as any human would, which didn’t work, and the relationship ended (thank God). But Dr. Nutmeg survived as I stuffed everything from my shadow self into her. Not only is she jealous — she is competitive. She is insecure. Self-centered. Narcissistic.
Wow. That was easier to write out loud than I thought it would be!
Bueno — fast forwarding to now, I understand that:
Season 1 was about my jealousy driving me to use my mad scientist skills to re-build myself into the “perfect woman” so I could “win” the competition against other women.
Season 2 was about transforming my sadness into comedy after failing to “win” the competition that could never be won: “If I can’t have my own MAN, at least I can build an app like GETKnocked Up to have a child on my own!” The app fails in beta testing.
Season 3 is WAY different from the previous two. As I am editing it, I am understanding it’s about becoming “interdependent” after finally finding a worthy MAN and his daughter. We are family. :)
Dr. Nutmeg finally stops projecting “Mal de Ojo” into her Femmebots and finds true success. It nice to see things ending on a happier note than how they started...especially as our real world is slipping further into the darkness of wars, climate change, inequality, homelessness, mental health decline…
But wait! What about the third question?
If Dr. Nutmeg is Latina, why isn’t her surname Spanish?
So we just found out that the woman who inspired Dr. Nutmeg was a doctor whose first name was Meg. She wasn’t Latina, but my Mal de Ojo toward her certainly was, so why not change her name to Dr. Magdalena Ortiz Martinez Ocasio or Dr. Lourdes Rodriguez Fernandez Crespo Latorre Nieves Nieves?
I think now is the time to tell the story of when I changed my name from Melanie Feliciano to “Kemila Velan” for three years. Yup. Not only did characters “pop up” in my little imagination throughout the years, I literally became one of them for three whole years — as a little experiment.
You know who likes to do little experiments? Mad scientists like Dr. Nutmeg.
When I was Kemila Velan, my entire life path changed because the name came from Kabalarians.com. If you click on that link, you’ll see that’s what they promise if you change your name to something that is “more aligned” with your birth date.
Kemila Velan is the name I used when I applied to work for the tech startup in Coconut Grove where I met all the Latinas who inspired The Femmebots.
Kemila Velan is the name I was using when I met my first Latino angel investor (John Garcia).
Kemila Velan won a Sunshine State Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2006.
Kemila Velan met the famous Stan Lee of Marvel Comics and featured him as a guest on her online writing workshops.
Kemila Velan met Hazel Henderson, the Godmother of Socially Responsible Investing, and became a close mentee.
Kemila Velan was basically free to do whatever she wanted, and be whomever she wanted, because she was no longer shackled by her family’s surname. I know. It was weird.
Actors change their names all the time. So do criminals, haha.
Why did I change my name? I just wanted to know what it was like to be completely disconnected from family legacy, family baggage, family ties. I wanted to be independent, and you know — it worked. I felt free to follow my own path (as you can see above), but after three years of the charade, I started to feel like a fraud. Underneath the mask was still me, little Melanie — a Latina daughter programmed by Latino parents with mostly Latino values.
Kemila Velan was a word without context or hyperlinks…until a venture capitalist in Toronto asked me: “Velan? Of the Velan family?” And I was like, “Uhhh. Yeah.”
After a Google search and freaking out that there were REAL people with this name, I decided I could no longer play the role of heiress to Czech philanthropists with any real confidence. Even though the name made even more sense when I was studying film in Prague, I was no Anna Delvey. Are you laughing out loud right now? Cuz I am.
So I went back to Melanie Feliciano, the “authentically” damaged me. I trashed the pen name, asked a few people on LinkedIn to change their recommendations from Kemila Velan to Melanie Feliciano (which was confusing for them at first), but I worked hard to explain the story…and came back to myself, at least until I became “Super Gringa” in Brazil…but that’s another freaking story, hahahahahahaha. Geez.
Anyways, the moral of the story is: You don’t need a Spanish-sounding surname to be Latino/a. Examples: Salma Hayek. Benjamin Bratt. And this girl from the Texas border.
How do I answer this common question in Season 3 of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots?
I haven’t added that dialogue, but I think one of the Femmebots can say something like:
“Nutmeg? That’s not a Latin surname — which country are you from?”
And Dr. Nutmeg can say something like:
“I was born and raised in America.”
Booooya! Now it’s got that little political twist. Should I write about people wanting Bad Bunny to endorse Kamala Harris? Na. But that would be cool, right?
Hecho en las Americas.