New Page 1

Monday, January 2, 2006 (published in The Bergen Record, Available online at www.northjersey.com)

By RUTH PADAWER
STAFF WRITER

One Sunday afternoon, after leaving the church bazaar and before starting dinner, Joan Alice Dillon cast her bare chest in plaster - or more precisely, cast the space where her right breast used to be.

The act was both personal and political, an affirmation of her own endurance and a way to join women across the land who have battled the same disease. The cast will be part of an exhibit featuring rows and rows of resin breasts - some with scars or lumps, some reconstructed, some untouched by scalpels, some just flat plains. Every one is from a real woman, like and unlike the one next to it.

"I wanted to be counted," said Dillon, age 60, who had a mastectomy in June 2004. "I wanted to show that none of us is alone."

The project was conceived by Mary Ellen Scherl of Tenafly, an established artist who had a lumpectomy after her own breast cancer scare, and whose mother was diagnosed some 30 years ago.

For years, Scherl had been nagged by the specter of the disease, often wondering how to strike back. One Saturday in August, driving down a country road near her second home upstate, she had her epiphany: casts of cancer-affected breasts laid out in a grid so boundless that it demanded public attention. Each breast would be engraved with the name or nickname of its owner, a sort of AIDS quilt that would project the vastness of the disease and the boldness of those it attacks.

"I knew it was something big," said Scherl. "This project kind of owns me now. It's like a purpose bigger than myself."

Calling her project "Mamorial," she formed a non-profit foundation to raise money for medical research and early detection, and began lining up corporate underwriters and sponsors.

In late October, Scherl sent an e-mail to friends, describing her idea and asking them to spread the word. Spread it they did.

Inquiries arrive daily - from friends of friends of friends in Arizona, California, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, New York and New Jersey. In less than two months, she has already received more than 20 molds. Ultimately, Scherl hopes to collect hundreds or thousands to exhibit. As part of the installation, tape loops will play of participants' words, talking about hope and fear, gratitude and survival.

Some of the women don't even have the disease, but carry the BrCa1 "breast cancer" gene that increases their chance of developing the illness by as much as 80 percent compared with women in the general population.

"My best friend in high school used to say my breasts were my '10 Extra Points,'Ÿ" said one 41-year-old participant, who will have a bilateral mastectomy in January to lower her risk. "My husband said they were my best feature. But now that I know I have the gene, I know I have to lose them. It's an absolutely horrific idea - to have your breasts chopped off. But I know women who have breast cancer and I don't know if some of them will make it.

"It's not worth dying over my breasts. Or being sick on chemotherapy and being worried for years about whether or not I will live to see my children grow up. I'll have a fake set, but I'm so relieved that my real breasts will be safe and sound somewhere, that they won't really disappear."

Already, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center and Pascack Valley Hospital have agreed to host mold-making sessions for their patients and the community. Scherl is also prepared to travel around the country to hold sessions at other medical centers and cancer support groups.

"There's something about this disease that makes women feel very unique and alone, and also very much part of a group," said Dr. Miguel Sanchez, director of Englewood Hospital's Breast Center. "This project addresses both of those feelings."

Stage III cancer, she faces 27 weeks of chemotherapy, followed by a mastectomy. She wanted to make the mold before she lost her breast to surgery.

"Some of my female friends and colleagues have a hard time dealing with me since I was diagnosed, because to speak to me is to see themselves in a mirror, and it's a scary mirror," said Daniel, 49, a North Bergen Verizon manager. "Here I am, someone who eats well, doesn't smoke, scuba dives and plays racquetball, exercises a lot - and it hit me, so it could just as easily hit them.

"This project makes people confront the reality of breast cancer: how common it is and that it could get any one of us. Next time you're in a room of 20 women, look around. Two or three of them will develop breast cancer. And that's too many."

For now, the casts - large, small, youthful, sagging, unblemished, marred -are laid out in Scherl's studio in Tenafly, alongside rolls of plaster, piles of stirring sticks, mixing containers, brushes and quick-drying rubber paint. She mails these supplies to women, who make the molds and mail them back in prepaid boxes. Every few weeks, Scherl hauls the molds to a foundry in Queens, where she casts them in a resin dyed to match each woman's particular skin tone.

Scherl, who was the art director at the prominent advertising firm of Young & Rubicam for 15 years, began sculpting only a few years ago. Since then, her work has been at the Grounds for Sculpture museum in Hamilton and at exhibits in New York sponsored by the National Sculpture Society.

One piece, towering 7 feet tall, is permanently installed at the Vanderbilt University Medical Plaza. One of the first women to send in a mold was Susie Firestone, a 58-year-old in Florida who was diagnosed in 1992. When her chemo sessions threatened to interfere with a long-planned trip to Morocco, Firestone scheduled her appointments for the day before and a few days after her 10-day vacation.

"My husband says I'm too tough to kill," said Firestone with a laugh. "I don't let anything get me down. I can beat it no matter what it is."

Fast facts

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women other than skin cancer.

More than 200,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, and more than 40,000 will die this year. There are slightly more than 2 million women in the United States who have been treated for breast cancer.

The chance of a woman having invasive breast cancer sometime during her life is about one in eight. The chance of dying from breast cancer is about one in 33.