February 24, 1998
New York Woman --------- Life in the City

BREAST CANCER: THE NAKED TRUTH
Pretty images are no easy sell

SURVIVING IN STYLE: Actress and writer Liza Vann will talk about her breast cancer in an upcoming one-woman show.

By SAMME CHITTUM

Liza Vann used to have breast cancer. She doesn't anymore. But she still has her breasts. And they look, well, rather smashing.

Doubters should check out this week's Village Voice and Time Out New York, which will hit news stands Wednesday.

Both will feature full page black-and-white ads of the Manhattan performance artist, her slender torso naked from the waist up, hands on hips, her shoulders thrown back. Stamped across her abdomen are the terse comments: "No Reconstruction. No Retouching. No Nonsense."

One place you won't get to see the brazen ad, however, is New York Magazine, which had the chance to get on the Vann wagon, but bailed out.

That despite the fact that Vann was willing to plunk down $26,000 for a full-page ad unveiling her version of the naked truth.

"The only image most women have ever seen is a mastectomy," says Vann. And the ravaged breast, which shocked many when the artist Matuschka appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in '93, has now become a blue print of what women expect to look like after surgery.

That's not good enough for Vann.

Plenty of magazines have run such photos, she says, so why would the sight of a pretty pair of breasts post-surgery be subject to censure?

Nathaniel Brown, a spokesman for the magazine, chalked up the trendy periodical's rather stodgy refusal to run Vann's ad to the fact that decision makers there saw only a photo, not a finished ad.

"We were handed a concept, but not something substantive we could run," contends Brown. "Bare breasts didn't enter into it." And with a parting shot to Vann, Brown adds that telling other media about it "seems like a great way to get publicity."

There's no doubt that the ad will promote Vann's one-woman show, "The Top of the Bottom Half," which runs March 4 through 8 at the Theater at St. Peter's Church. The autobiographical piece discusses her cancer. But it's also about making a difference.

Her point: "to de-program women" who expect to look bad after surgery. The battle-scarred survivor is an outdated image, and even misleading because it suggests women must settle for less.

"I want them to see what a good job looks like," she says.

While women with breast cancer have been asking for, and getting, less traumatizing alternatives to mastectomies, including lumpectomies with reconstruction, for some time now, Vann believes that reconstruction is a poor step sister to the best alternative - doing less damage, cut by cut, micro-inch by inch, along the way.

Vann attributes her near flawless appearance to the fact that she fought so hard to protect her body from gratuitous surgical abuse. She insisted that her surgeon avoid severing chest muscles, specifically her pectoralis minor, and in general work more like a plastic surgeon, making finer, less visible cuts around her nipples to get at the cancer.

"The areola cut," she says, "is the most aesthetic cut you're going to get."

"I had three surgeries on the left breast and one on the right breast," she continues. "I had axillary node dissection, radiation and chemo. All these things have happened to this body."

Breast cancer may be the un-kindest cut of all. But Vann says looking whole after the cancer is gone is half the battle.

"The idea that this is vain or superficial is absurd. I'm talking about keeping the integrity of your body."