NY TIMES: Favorable Review of Breast C Sassiness on LIFETIME

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/arts/television/23luca.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

My opinion: I suppose that a Norman Cousins-esque humorous antidote to
disease is better than not, though I watched a tivo of last week's
BOSTON LEGAL, because Wm Shatner is bigger boob


Fighting Cancer With Sass and Gloss
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Geralyn Lucas

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By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: October 23, 2006
With a memoir titled "Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy,"
Geralyn Lucas turned her battle with breast cancer at age 27 into a
sassy calling card for everything from inspirational speeches to
flashing her scar to other survivors. After all, she is a television
journalist turned director of public affairs for the Lifetime channel.
Now, her life unrolls in front of the camera instead of behind it, as
the book-based film of the same title has its premiere at 9 tonight on
the channel for which she works.

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Lifetime Television
Sarah Chalke in "Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy."
"I felt this book was the book I wanted to read when I was
diagnosed," Ms. Lucas, now 39, said during a recent lunch interview
that included a celebratory glass of Champagne. "I really thought I
was going to die. All the films, all the books, were just so gloomy and
traumatic. I wanted to show women that they are so much more than their
breasts, that there is life at the other side of the pain."

Humor got Ms. Lucas through surgery and chemotherapy. The film stays
true to that spirit. In "Lipstick," she promises her cute husband
to one of her girlfriends, meets a taxi driver who had surgery for
testicular cancer and who says, "I dance better" after the
operation, and she renames plastic surgery reconstruction photos
"breast mug shots."

Funny stuff, but an estimated one woman in eight receives a diagnosis
of breast cancer during her lifetime. Ms. Lucas said she was hoping
that her story would push women to be examined, explore their options,
donate money to research. "This disease cuts at being a woman," she
said. "There's a message from when you're little: having big
breasts and big hair is currency."

Lifetime is known for films that plumb the female experience, but there
has never been one about an employee, said Meredith Wagner, the
channel's vice president for public affairs and corporate
communications and Ms. Lucas's boss. Ms. Lucas joined Lifetime in
2000 as director of original programming. The "Lipstick" manuscript
had caught the attention of Ms. Wagner in 2004, right before it was
published by St. Martin's Press. A short time later the book was
independently presented to the network's movie department by Ms.
Lucas's agent and then turned into a script by Nancey Silvers (who
also wrote Lifetime's "Mom at Sixteen" and "Revenge of the
Middle-Aged Woman").

Lifetime conducts a breast-cancer campaign every October, which is
national breast-cancer awareness month, and a number of possible
projects on the subject are considered by Lifetime executives. The
channel's entertainment president, Susanne Daniels, was alerted by
Ms. Wagner to the "Lipstick" script. The project got a go-ahead for
production on its own merits, Ms. Daniels said.

"I just thought, 'I can't remember ever watching a film about
breast cancer that made me laugh, with such a charming protagonist, a
happy ending and one of Lifetime's own,' " she said.

"What the movie does so beautifully is normalize a traumatic
experience," Ms. Daniels said. As part of the current "Stop Breast
Cancer for Life" campaign, a previously unreleased version of the
song in the film, called "I Am Not My Hair," by India.Arie and
Pink, will be available on iTunes beginning today. The original version
of the song, by Ms. Arie, is included on her album "Testimony: Vol.
1, Life & Relationship," which reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart.
Ms. Lucas is played by Sarah Chalke ("Scrubs"), who is tall and
blond as opposed to the petite, raven-haired Ms. Lucas, but otherwise
channels her upbeat, chatty personality. Patti LaBelle, the singer, has
a role as a fellow chemotherapy patient, Monisha, who comes to
treatment with covered with makeup and coos, "I'm going to be fly
until I die."

Ms. LaBelle, who lost three sisters to colon, lung and brain cancer
before any celebrated a 44th birthday, said in an interview that she
read the script and jumped at the part. "There was one point I had to
stop because I was crying so hard," Ms. LaBelle said of the filming.
She said she would donate proceeds from her forthcoming CD, "The
Gospel According to Patti LaBelle," to cancer research. Ms. Lucas is
one of her new heroines, Ms. LaBelle said, because she spreads the word
that breast cancer is not just a middle-age illness.

"She's so spunky," Ms. LaBelle said of Ms. Lucas. "She wears
her five-inch heels and her red lipstick. I learned a lot from her just
from the way she carries herself."

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Fighting Cancer With Sass and Gloss
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Published: October 23, 2006
(Page 2 of 2)



Ms. Chalke recalled seeing Ms. Lucas two years ago on the "Today"
show, before she was offered the chance to play her. "I had already
been blown away by her and her story," Ms. Chalke said. As she got
into character, she asked Ms. Lucas for more details. How did the
ordeal affect her marriage? How much did it hurt when the doctor
injected solution into her chest before the breast reconstruction
procedure?

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At the time of her diagnosis, Ms. Lucas was a hard-driving,
schedule-juggling newlywed, dreaming of motherhood and working as a
producer at ABC News's "20/20." When she received conflicting
medical advice on handling her cancer - from double mastectomy to a
lumpectomy - she did what any self-possessed honors graduate of
Columbia University's journalism school would do: she headed to a
strip club to ponder the power of the mammary gland. The film shows
that, too.

"I'd gone there to decide whether or not to have a mastectomy,"
the "Lipstick" voice-over says, as Ms. Lucas sits alone in a purple
velvet booth and orders a beer, no glass. Or as she says to a waitress,
"Isn't it weird how women have the power to hypnotize men into a
trance simply by taking off their tops?"

Post-mastectomy (she had surgery the day after her 28th birthday),
"Lipstick" shows a life out of whack. Her parents arrive from
Philadelphia and are both comforting and in the way. Her husband, Tyler
Lucas (played by Jay Harrington), is tender and supportive, but as a
doctor he feels that he should do more. In the movie, Ms. Lucas has two
bubbly buddies ("composites from my group of girlfriends") who
always show up, but they also make her husband jealous. She vomits. She
loses her hair. She keeps going.

It all happened pretty much that way, Ms. Lucas said the other day.
Dressed in black and wearing her now-trademark red lipstick, she said
she learned the hard way that she is much more than a right breast, a
glowing complexion, a head full of hair.

"I lost them all and discovered my inner cleavage," Ms. Lucas said.
"I always felt I was more like the smart girl, the good girl; I never
got by on my looks. I went to all these doctor appointments with my
father and I said: 'Look, I don't care about my breast. It's just
a breast.' My dad said, 'Geralyn, you do care.' I had to
acknowledge that I did care, the power of the breast, before I could
move on."

A bright red lipstick, she said, became one of the symbols of what made
her strong. In October 2001 she also posed topless for Self, a
women's magazine, showing off a 1997 tattoo of a heart with wings at
the end of her scar. When that photograph appeared, "I looked into my
eyes and for the first time in my life I felt beautiful," Ms. Lucas
said.

To this day, Ms. Lucas said that she does not know why she developed
cancer so young but that she is still beating the odds. "Lipstick"
ends with the birth of her daughter, Skye, now 7. After warnings about
her low chance of conceiving a second time ("five percent," the
doctors said) and the danger of skyrocketing hormones during pregnancy,
Ms. Lucas had her son, Hayden, in April.

"I know the power of stories," Ms. Lucas said. "I thought 'How
can I not tell this story?' "

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