February 11, 1998
The New York Times METRO

Public Lives

by James Barron with Deborah Sontag

Not in New York

To promote her one-woman show, "The Top of the Bottom Half," the actress and playwright LIZA VANN was ready to spend $27,000 on an advertisement in New York magazine. Ms Vann, who has had a lumpectomy and two other operations on her left breast, wanted a flip-up photograph of her from the waist up. With nothing on.

We were brainstorming, and I said, 'This is my idea of the perfect ad: I would like a picture of me from the waist up, and I would like a flap and I want the flap to say, 'If you want to know what breast cancer looks like, lift this page, knowing full well that every person would think they are about to look at a mastectomy.'" She said that running a photo of a woman who had a mastectomy would be "politically correct," adding, "I have never seen a shot of a lumpectomy."

New York's readers won't either. The magazine turned down the ad. Ms. Vann said the rejection came after the magazine was shown the photo, but a spokesman for New York, NATHANIEL BROWN, took issue with that. "The first criteria was that they have to see the ad, and the ad was never created," he said. They couldn't accept something they never saw."