Happy Cancer Chick - The Women Behind the Web Series - Part 2 of 3

As the creator of the web series and social network HomeGirl.TV, I know firsthand that producing a web series is not as easy as it appears. And I had a simple concept.  Take on a serious issue that touches millions like cancer, and your project inherits multiple layers of complexity.  Using true stories about finding light in an experience people still talk about with dread and whispers…. who dares to do that?

The women behind the Happy Cancer Chick did. Not just once but twice. Read the second installment of my 3-part Q&A with creator Linda Nieves-Powell and co-producer Jenny L. Saldaña after watching the following webisode from Season 2.

SQ:  How was producing HCC different from your video Shit Girls Say to Girls with Breast Cancer?

JLS:  Well, the obvious is that we shot that in one day over two hours, and that’s it. I think people now know that Shit Girls Say is so much deeper than it seems on the surface. I actually now show it to newly diagnosed breast cancer patients as a guide to what to expect. Producing HCC was completely different. Even for season one I had to dig down low into some parts of me I wasn't ready to revisit. With season two, I knew I was asking other women to do the same. For some it was rough. One woman told me she had filed all those feelings away until I brought them back with our interview.

SQ:  And what did each of you bring to the production of HCC?

JLS:  Linda is the brain. She came up with the concept and execution. There would be no HCC without her. She even coined the phrase. I'm the cancer expert and resource. I have a lot of connections in the cancer world so was able to get the doctor on board as well as some sponsors. I'm a good schmoozer.

LNP:  I have 15 years of experience in writing and about 10 years in directing and producing.  Although most of this experience was in theater and some film, it transfers well. 

SQ: Given how unfortunately prevalent cancer has become, a series like this could develop a major following. Yet with so much "noise" on the internet, it can be hard to break through. What are you plans for increasing the likelihood that HCC will do just that?

JLS:  Linda might better answer this, but I think that social media is our biggest friend as well as enemy. All we can do is chat it up and hope the conversation continues.

LNP:  I agree with Jenny.  The web is a hangout.  You can't predict what will happen next.  Trends come and go very quickly here.  Attentions spans are super short.   People are not themselves a hundred percent on the web.  It will take time before we see a webseries compete with an HBO show.  A long time. Maybe the web is great just to try new ideas before they hit TV. Folks are getting noticed here.  When I created this show, I didn't expect anything but to reach the women I felt would benefit from this message.  That's all.  I didn't have any great expectations.  I just always want to do a good job.  Period.

The very happy Happy Cancer Chick production team

SQ:  How have you changed and grown as a result of producing HHC?

JLS:  I've learned a lot from this process. I had never been on the production side of a series before. I've learned that, for the most part, if you ask, people will acquiesce. We got a lot of free stuff!

LNP: Oh my.  I am a tech geek and I just got geekier.  Really.  I love this stuff!  Love camera patches and hacks!  I can work a mean hack on my Canon. Learned about photography.  I try to stay on top of technology like the newest 2k or 4k cameras, the lenses, the editing software, all of that good stuff.  It helps to know these things in the event you have to step into a job or when you go to hire someone, you know exactly what you need. 

Working on Happy Cancer Chick afforded me a great experience.  I became a SAG and WGA signatory producer.  This means when I'm ready to work on the next idea, my production company, Odd Girl In Entertainment is already set up with both unions.

The more I work on productions, the more I learn about the craft of storytelling. I am writer.  My writing informs my other skills. 

Things are really opening up on the web.  If you browse YouTube and Vimeo, kids, actual teens and younger are doing amazing things on their own.  They shoot, produce and edit their own films now. It's really a new and exciting time.  

Mia Valour prepares Antonia Marrero to play cancer survivor Evelyn Reyes 

SQ: Jenny, as THE Happy Cancer Chick, do you ever hear from cancer survivors who feel pressured to "bright-side" their experience? Others have criticized "pink ribbon culture" for putting a happy face on breast cancer, arguing that it actually makes it difficult to demand a cure. What’s your take on all this?

JLS: Cancer SUCKS!! Everything about it SUCKS. It's scary, painful, and everything you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Even though I've tried to remain positive throughout my journey I've had many a blue day. I HATED talking to survivors! I felt like, "Who the hell are you? You graduated already. Of course, you're happy!" So I know that now that I'm on this end, some may feel the same about me. Every cancer journey is different and all must come to grips with how they want to deal with it. I do think that having a positive outlook makes the journey a little less 'sucky,' but you're allowed to hate every minute of every thing that's happening to you.

About pink… we have pink overload in our society to the point that it's more business than anything else. However, I have found a way to use pink to my advantage. I have a pink ribbon on every coat I own. I want to mark or brand myself as a breast cancer survivor to let others know that I’m a safe haven and will always help. Humor helped me get to the other end of the tunnel. To "graduate" and to lead the way for others. My way doesn't have to work for you. It just had to work for me.

SQ:  You know I have to ask you about Lance Armstrong….

JLS: To millions of cancer survivors – yours truly included – Lance Armstrong will always be a hero. He beat cancer three times and took that to create a wonderful organization that is bigger than him. Yes, he's a failed jock. His ego got bigger than the person, but the organization that will live long after we're gone is going to continue to help and inspire cancer patients. Livestrong inspires, educates and helps which is what we wanted to do with HCC.

Stay tuned next week for Part III of my Q & A with the fierce women behind Happy Cancer Chick. In the meantime, you can read Part I here, watch all five webisodes on YouTube and connect with the producers on Facebook. And by all means, comment and share! 

Stepping Baldacious to Snagglepuss

As I descend my steps, I suspect that's Snagglepuss entering the bodega, but I choose to head there now anyway. Before my diagnosis, not only would I have waited him out, I would have done so in the house, afraid that he might spot me the front porch and start his bullshit. Today I start something in the hopes of finishing it.

Snagglepuss is my primary harasser. I presume all who present female have at least one. His street name is Pooh. I don’t know what his mother named him, but in this neighborhood, his government name just might be Pooh, too.

His MO is to tell me I look good, that he loves me, and that he would marry (at least he knows damn well better than to propose.) Relentlessly. He insists that we went to school together. Chemo brain or not, I know homeboy didn’t go to school. Snags doesn’t even know my name. It’s, “Miss, miss… yo, I’d marry you.”  Eventually, he will yell, “You don’t have to say hi to me, but I’m never gonna stop trying to talk to you.”

And that’s a frightening thing to hear from a man who knows where you live.

As I sit on my porch typing this minutes after our encounter, Snagglepuss is walking out of the bodega back towards the Laundromat. In his red fisherman’s cap, red and white striped button-down shirt and red t-shirt, he’s like Radio Raheim had been styled by Garanimals.

Even though I walked into the bodega knowing that he was there, I find myself hoping he won’t notice me. I consider slipping out and coming back.

But then the kid that works there – a young guy in his early twenties who has a crush on me but engages me with politeness and respect – finally comments on my hair. Or more accurately my lack thereof.

“You look different.” Thinking that the baldness couldn’t be new to him since it’s been three weeks since the Big Buzz, I give him a quizzical look. After all, I am one of those chicks who runs to the store in chancl’as and sleepwear. Then Youngblood gestures towards his own cornrows, and I realize that he’s referring to my shaved head.

Before I can say a word, Snagglepuss turns. His eyes widen as he takes in my baldness and recognizes me. “You still look good!”

I ignore him and say to Youngblood, “Oh, it’s been like this for a few weeks now.” Instantaneously knowing and no longer caring that this will probably make me fodder for neighborhood gossip – especially among those who presumed that I lobbed off eight inches of thick curly hair to get my Amber Rose on – I add, “It was going to fall out anyway because I’m being treated for cancer right now so I decided to shave it off first.”

Even though I say this with a huge and genuine smile on my face, homeboy cringes. “I’m sorry.”

I got to give him credit for consistency. This news doesn’t faze Snagglepuss one bit. “So you do talk,” he says, boring his eyes into my profile. “I’d still marry you though.” 

Operation Ignore continues unabated. “My dad did, too,” I tell Youngblood, trying to chip away at that unnecessary look of pity on his face. “He took me to his barbershop.” Now dude is really cringing, and I want to snap at him to knock it off. Instead I grin on. “It was fun!” At this point, I probably don’t sound so convincing even though that experience was one of the most affirming I ever had in a male-dominated space.

“Why you don’t talk to me?” says Snags. “I be nice to you.”

So now the man has to pay for Youngblood’s well-intended but unwanted pity and his own imposition. “No, you’re not nice to me. Telling me good morning and keepin’ it moving is nice. Chasing after me down the block hollering that you love me and want to marry me when I’ve told you that I don’t like it is disrespectful.”

“OK,” he says with eyes like a remorseful child. Something in me yields ever so slightly. “I’m sorry. You forgive me?”

But I remember that we’ve been here before, and nothing changed.  “You and I have had this conversation before, but you don’t listen to me,” I remind him. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.” The bodegüero looks at me as if to say Give me your order, nena, so I can get you outta here. “Un cafecito regular, por favor.”  He hustles behind the counter to the coffeemaker.

 “I’m sorry,” Snagglepuss repeats. “You forgive me?”

And I do want to forgive him. A major strategy in my journey back to wellness from breast cancer has been practicing forgiveness. One indicator of my healing has been the way men have responded to my baldness.  At Junco’s barbershop under my father’s protective and loving eye, my barber Richie and most of the other male employees and patrons held the space while I gave up one of society’s most cherished symbols of femininity. Now as I walk down the street, men compliment me with nothing but appreciation and respect. No sleazy undertone beneath their remarks, no dissecting the rest of my body with their tongues, no invasion of my personal space.  They say, “I like that look” for no other reason than to gift me that affirmation.

Oh, some men still harass me, proving the biggest lesson of this chapter of my life: cancer both changes everything and nothing. The power dynamics of the pavement remain the same. The men who articulate their awareness of me in a way that makes me feel safe make the choice to do so, and that is why to some degree I feel compelled to call it a gift. They decide to not harass me.

By the same token, I have found – no… recovered - and seized whatever agency I do possess on that unlevel playing field that is the street, and that more often than not has altered the potential scenario.  By choosing to walk these blocks literally stepping unapologetically into my proactive baldness, I say I’m more beautiful and stronger than ever. I dare you to talk sideways to me. I’m kicking cancer’s ass, and yours can be next.  Therefore, I’m radiating something that the men who compliment me merely choose to mirror back to me. To that extent, they aren’t giving me anything as much as they're reflecting what I have given myself. 

Please know that I have not lost sight that there are people out there who make other choices at the sight of a bald woman. Hurtful even violent choices. I do not mean to say that those they violate are somehow responsible for those transgressions and crimes. I do mean to acknowledge that I am not the first, the most vulnerable or even the bravest in the risk to be this authentic.  Empowerment – especially of one’s self – always entails risk.  As long as we live in a world where domination is normalized be it personal or political, authenticity will always necessitate risk. If anything, stepping baldacious is a choice that I can make, in part, because others have blazed a trail for me so that I can follow a road that is less treacherous. The only credit I can take is the choice to take that road.

“You accept my apology?” presses Snagglespuss.

And because cancer changes everything and nothing, I lay down the rules of engagement. I may be bald and have only one natural breast, but I neither want nor need Snags' validation. “You want me to forgive you? Don’t just tell me your sorry,” I say as I slide my change across the counter and take my coffee. “Show me by the way you talk to me. If you see me and tell me good morning, I’ll be nice back and say good morning, too. I’ve got no problem being neighborly witchu. But if you start with the BS about how much you love me and want to marry and are never going to stop harassing me, it’s gonna be a wrap.”

I punctuate that by slashing my hand across my throat. I don’t know what that means myself. I can’t stop Snagglepuss from saying things to me on the street, and now he knows that I’m being treated for breast cancer. That information in his hands can either shield or backfire on me. But in a way, how he handles my truth isn’t really my business.  I have a new truth now: I’m no longer going to be dipping behind cars and waiting on my gated porch to do me because he’s ambling down the avenue.

“OK. I’m sorry. Have a nice day.”

“You, too.”

In the past, I have willed myself to feel compassion towards Pooh with rare success. Now that I have set boundaries with him, it comes easy. It even feels a little like love. My more compassionate suspicions about him move from the back of my mind to the front of my heart. He’s probably struggling with some kind of mental illness. You don’t see him for stretches at a time because he’s in and out of institutions of some kind. Pooh really doesn’t mean any harm.   

Does this mean that I don’t expect him to completely forget or ignore our conversation and act the same way the next time we run into each other? Not at all. But I pray that the power I feel now is still with me whether I’m bald or not. Even more so, I hope that should I need to reinforce my boundary, I can do so with the newfound compassion I have now as well. It is so human to desire visibility without becoming a target.   

Arguing with Audre: On My Impending Mastectomy and Reconstruction

As a strident feminist of color, of course, I would read Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals now that I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer. In addition to reading practical books with strategies for beating the illness, I also wanted food for the soul that would enable me as a spiritual being and political animal to draw meaning from the experience. What better to read than the memoirs of radical cultural activists such as Fred Ho and Audre Lorde?

I had long been an admirer of Mother Lorde's work, but I had never had the courage to read the work she produced during her battle with first breast and then later liver cancer. That's how much fear the mere word instilled in me. I was oblivious to just how prevalent this illness is even when my best friend was diagnosed with and survived ovarian cancer in 2003 and my own grandmother succumbed to colon cancer in 2005.

Fear is hereditary it seems. My own mother is a 12-year breast cancer survivor and did not even know she had it. Neither did my father. I remember back in 1993 when they found a lump in her right breast. My only image is of my mother crying quietly as they wheeled her into surgery. Having never been in the hospital her entire life except to birth her three children, Ma was frightened. I remember several hours later the doctor telling us, “It was nothing.”

Once the shock of my own diagnosis had passed and I entered warrior mode, my mother and I shared scars. I showed her the fine needle marks of the two spots where my left breast had been biopsied, and she showed me where she received radiation. “Radiation?” My reaction surprised her. She reminded me of the time that I accompanied her and my father to the hospital for her daily radiation treatment. But they don’t give radiation to people who don’t have cancer, do they? After all, radiation can cause cancer.

She told me she still had her records, and I asked her to find them. Sure enough, in 2000 my mother had been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, underwent a lumpectomy and had twenty rounds of radiation. It never registered to either of my parents that she was being treated for breast cancer. They just did as the doctors told them and then moved on with their lives.

This discovery left me with a variety of thoughts and emotions. First was the angry thought. What the fuck kind of medical care do we have in this country that a 69-year old woman can be treated for breast cancer and never know it? Then I imagined all the times I sat in waiting rooms over the years, completing family histories across a wooden clipboard with a chained pen and checking No in the box next to cancer. Had I known that my mother had breast cancer, I certainly would have been more vigilant in minding the health of my breasts. I finally settled on the positive. Given her personality, it’s probably best that Ma did not know she had breast cancer, and all that matters now is that she blazed the survivor trail, and I could follow in her footsteps.

Of course, being my own woman, I have to pack different tools for my journey to survivorship. My mother, for example, would rather I not read so much. I had been reading Straight from the Hope: Letters of Hope and Inspiration from Survivors of Breast Cancer and that, coupled with the counseling I had been undergoing (which I began several months before I was diagnosed), helped spurred a healing crisis. As much as the letters delivered on the promise of hope and inspiration, they also triggered long-denied and deeply suppressed loneliness over my challenge in finding a life partner. So many of the women wrote about the men who loved them and stood by them as they faced breast cancer despite all the prices it exacts, from the lost of breasts to the threat of death. I call this a healing crisis because this despair needed to be excavated, felt and cleared if I was going to not only defeat cancer but truly become holistically well. Perhaps it’s because it is difficult for them to watch me sob over things that seem unrelated to my immediate circumstances, but my parents wish I would just focus on getting well. My father in particular understands why a cancer diagnosis would compel me to evaluate my life, but if he had his way, I’d cut it all this painful introspection. I have to remind my parents that my tears are a sign that I am getting well because I am going to the root of my dis-ease.

And I do moderate my cancer-related reading. I read enough to satisfy whatever desire I have in the moment for information or inspiration, and just when I brush against the edge of overwhelm, I stop. This is not typical for me who loves to read and can research incessantly once I become taken with a subject. I recognize that each person who embarks on the cancer journey must do whatever she feels is right for her, and I respect my own choices. Some people like my mother want to entrust themselves to their doctors and, to the best of their ability, focus on other aspects of their lives. Others choose to make confronting the illness their full-time job.

Knowing myself fairly well, I knew from the start that the best thing for me fell somewhere between the two extremes. The kind of person that I am, I cannot beat cancer by becoming a full-time patient. For someone like me, that’s giving the disease too much power. (That is the same reason why, when I begin chemotherapy, I will cut and donate my hair, shave my head and use it as an excuse to stock up on the hats, scarves and earrings I love so much.) By the same token, I cannot wait for my doctors to treat me but rather proactively take actions – change my diet, return to my meditation practice, become a client of You Can Thrive where I receive complementary treatments such as Reiki and acupuncture etc. – to heal myself. (It also means excising things from life – habits, beliefs and people – that do not serve me.) I continue to finish working toward my MFA in writing and producing for television, pursue my interest in burlesque with Pink Light Burlesque, and otherwise live my life – the life I find worth fighting for – on my terms.

Perhaps this is why I find myself becoming angry with Mother Lorde when I read the following passage in her cancer journals:

I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated in a new sense of self. The absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. I miss it, sometimes piercingly. When other one-breasted women hide behind the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction, I find little support in the broader female environment for my rejection of what I feel is cosmetic sham. But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended on Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?

I don’t know if this is a quirk all my own, but it’s not easy for me to fight with an ideological titan such as Audre Lorde even in my head, but fight with her I did. It’s not lost on me that she lost her breast at a time when breast cancer treatment was far more limited and reconstruction was only available to the economically privileged. (It is now federal law that for women whose health insurance covers mastectomies, the company must also cover reconstruction. This right includes women covered by Medicaid. In fact, I am insured under a special Medicaid program created specifically for people diagnosed with certain cancers.) I recognize that there is much greater awareness and less stigma of breast cancer in the twenty-two years since she first wrote that passage. I have no doubt that if Mother Lorde were alive today she would have radical critique of pink ribbon culture as well as a thorough analysis of the discrepancies in the prevention and treatment of women of color, queer women and poor and working-class women, and that she would experience and acknowledge a wider acceptance of her desire not to hide her mastectomy if she stuck with that decision.

Still I was angry at Audre. I stewed over that passage and wrote furiously in my journal. I understood and respected her point on an intellectual level. She meant that being able to undergo reconstruction can allow someone to become politically complacent about the institutionalized oppression that perpetuates breast cancer. When Audre wrote about what might happen if an army of single-breasted women descended on the capitol demanding change, I saw it. The image compelled me as an activist and an artist. If I did not have the option of reconstruction, I would step without hesitation into that vision and be part of it.

But as a socially conscious woman, I would be a part of such an action whether or not I underwent reconstruction, and I would like to think that I and my saline implants would not have my integrity questioned. I haven’t finished The Cancer Journals, and so perhaps she undergoes a shift of which I’m not yet aware, but thus far Audre talks about reconstruction without considering the blessings she had that made it easier to forgo one. She had a partner. She had children. She had recognition for the work she did. For what of someone like me who is young, single and hopeful that such love and appreciation is still possible for me, especially if I can transform myself through my journey back to wellness?

The ironic thing about my anger at Mother Lorde is that my own mother wants me to conserve my breast. She would rather I have chemotherapy before surgery in an effort to shrink the tumor with the hope that a lumpectomy will suffice. My breast surgeon would comply with my wishes if this was something I chose to do, but I am following my instinct which is to heed his recommendation: give up my breast. While I don't fool myself that I will sail through this without great emotional pain, I am at peace with my choice. Truth be told, reconstruction makes it much easier even though the method I have chosen means that I will not wake up from surgery with an already reconstructed breast to ease the pain of the natural one I lost.

The fantasy Mother Lorde dismisses is about having a certain quality of life and making a decision to not acquiesce everything the disease attempts to demand. I wrote in my journal:

Must I take on every battle? Is this one not enough? Can I sit out the body image struggle, too? The truth is I can’t. Not for a minute. No amount of reconstruction – no matter how aesthetically pleasing to the Western standard of beauty it may be to the immediate eye – is going to make me forget that my God-given breast is gone, a casualty to this disease.

How does the fantasy of reconstruction favor me, if I am lucky enough to meet a man with whom I want to be intimate with in all ways, when I have to reveal and explain to him all the complexities – physical, emotional, spiritual -- of being a breast cancer survivor? There is nothing about replacing my natural breast with an implant that is going to permit me to lie to myself ever about what I am going through right now. On the contrary, it will be a constant reminder. While my feelings, thoughts and beliefs towards the experience may change and even improve over time, I will never be done with it. I can never forget.

How is that a fantasy when there’s no escape but only reminders?

And as I process my anger at Mother Lorde, I find myself wishing that she was alive so I can argue with her. The existence of my anger reminds me that I am very much alive and well, and had she herself survived cancer, Audre probably would have welcomed a loving yet vigorous debate with a younger feminist of color and fellow cancer warrioress. She remains an inspiration to me, and I embrace her challenge to remain politically vigilant in the ongoing war against cancer. I first must win the personal battle, however, and that means making the unapologetic choices that enable me to keep faith that more joy awaits me no matter what challenges oppression might dish.