Amazon

	he heat had hit me only a minute earlier, but I would have given anything to strip off my clothes.

Dr. Olsen stood before me and professed to have stumbled upon a brilliant idea that had the potential to turn the world of plastic surgery on its ear (or maybe he said 'rear', I honestly can't remember now because my insides were on fire).

I do recall struggling to keep a straight face and hoping it wasn't flushed. Those of us who work in advertising discount all hype but our own, whether coming from a cultural visionary or the planet's next attention-seeking loon. Although maybe he was trying to impress me so that I wouldn't simply assume he was wasting my time. I did rise from my chair, not because I felt intrigued but because the leather kept sticking to my sweaty suit.

My gynecologist had ordered me off all hormones a year ago and the curse had returned. Once you've taken estrogen for hot flashes, you think of it just like heroin and yearn more for one more good hit than a fine night of sex.

Dr. Olsen's voice seemed to re-emerge from out of nowhere. "What I need from your firm is an advertising campaign that's both elegant and artistic."

I just wanted to get rid of the fellow so I could throw open the window and maybe jump out. "Art is not advertising," I said, all but certain that a solo practitioner in private practice had no inkling of the financial commitment involved in signing on with a senior executive of the country's premier corporate marketing agency.

"Okay, then something smart and creative."

Between the night sweats and insomnia, I hadn't been sleeping well, and this meeting was jangling frayed and melting nerves. "Wrong again. Intelligence doesn't sell."

He seemed flustered. "What I mean, doll, is that I don't want you to goddamn ruin my reputation."

With that, Dr. Olsen commandeered a bit more of my attention. I handed him a business card. "I generally go by Pamela or Ms. Cooper, if it's all the same to you. At the moment, though, I'm rather busy (shaky, dizzy, dripping, irritable, about to spontaneously combust!), so let's not mince words. What you're probably trying to convey is to coax without demeaning."

"No, I'd say kick is more like it. I need you to create me a new market where no demand now exists. If you did it for Krispy Kreme," he said before I could pin him down on details, "you can do it for me."

"Except as good as that sounds, any aggressive promotion will indeed pose a risk to your good name, especially considering the conservatism of your profession. Any new product launch requires taking big chances, like challenging what's accepted and disrupting the status quo."

"Look, hon, I may be a beauty surgeon, but it's not like I know nothing about thinking outside the box (and I could just imagine him stuck inside the boundaries of his own puny imagination). Besides"—and he smiled— "proposals like mine don't come along every day."

Righto, I thought—probably for another wrinkle cream or a new take on the classic uplift bra. Having heard the same sort of braggadocio from too many other powerful men unsure about the merits of their requests, I'd hardened up over the years and come to care minimally about a client's charm or status and much more about a project's profit potential. "I'm afraid I have another meeting in a few minutes, so just summarize this fabulous scheme of yours in two or three sentences . . . (and then go away! so I can get out that embarrassing mini-spritzer/fan my staff gave me as a joke and hose down my burning face)."

"A single sentence should suffice, thank you." He looked me in the eyes. "I need you to convince the wide-eyed kittens of the world to sacrifice a breast." Then he grinned at me like a nutcase on a mental ward.

I stared back without blinking, perhaps without breathing, and then ordered my secretary to hold all calls and shut the door to my office. I undid the top button on my blouse, turned the air conditioner down to freezing, and extended my fullest consideration for the rest of the afternoon.

From the lunatic fringe, maybe, but this Dr. Olsen had until a few months ago been an associate professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University. His clinical work had focused on preventative mastectomy, which he described as the removal of normal breast tissue from a worried woman with a strong family incidence of breast cancer, a measure that decreased the chance of developing cancer by over 90%. As the breast tissue to be eradicated was still healthy, he'd been working on new methods of achieving this objective with minimal physical disruption of the skin and chest wall.

After modifying equipment designed for endoscopy and liposuction, he'd developed a technique for the near total extraction of internal breast tissue through three tiny incisions that left behind no noticeable surgical scarring.

Why he'd elected to go into academic medicine was beyond me. To hear him talk about it, he hated the politics and obligations. He seemed to me more of a cutter than a thinker, possessed by a entrepreneurial fire that was being starved for oxygen inside some hermetically-sealed corridor of a smelly medical school animal lab.

What he really wanted, I think, was some fame and money, neither of which had gone hand and hand with preventative medicine since the days of Louis Pasteur.

So, I was taken aback when he then characterized himself as more of a "thinker than a cutter," quite diligent but still a dreamer, a "plastic surgical rhapsodist" who had always preferred reading philosophy and psychology to the "dry drivel" that "polluted" the surgical journals. He'd become intrigued by more worldly topics such as beauty and then fashion and then feminism and before long found himself utterly bored by the radiological findings or actuarial statistics on breast cancer.

Of course, he was lying to me if not himself, trying to make his transition out of academics sound more like an awakening, like a coming to terms with his inner self, all aesthetic and logical. The man was no different than any other clueless buffoon who sat in front of me and pitched some idea that was little more than a dream.

But, honestly, I didn't care much about his deeper motives. Ours was a business relationship.

Although once I finally came to understand what he had in mind, I was repulsed at the deepest level. Still, I agreed to take on the project. I was, after all, in a profession not known for its code of high ethics, and this much he understood. What he failed to consider was that all people have their own personal agendas and he had no way of knowing mine.

He must have been encouraged by how readily I bought into his premise, hook, line, and sinker. If it were this simple convincing an experienced huckster, imagine how easy it was going to be swaying the world's naive nymphets who studied every photo in People Magazine and counted down the days between episodes of Extreme Makeover.

Especially after the movie.

The movie he kept referring to was Amazon, a grand retelling of legends borrowed from Greek mythology. The Amazons were a race of beautiful and honorable women who lived in Asia Minor during the days of celestial gods and epic heroes. Rebelling against sexism, they comprised a warlike sect that interacted with men only during battle and during the briefest of utilitarian sexual unions.

Newborn sons were given away or murdered while any daughters were nurtured into warriors of the highest caliber.

The name 'amazon' derived from two Greek words denoting the absence of a breast. The Amazons were known to cut off or sear the right breast to facilitate their skills with archery. They fought courageously on foot and horseback, wielded battle axes and spears, and, if necessary, were not beyond strangling their male foes.

According to legend, where they were persecuted quite relentlessly. Hercules killed the then-queen Hippolyta, the most beautiful and strongest woman of her day, while trying to make off with her golden girdle as part of his ninth labor. Achilles, no more the gentleman, murdered Queen Penthesilea during the Trojan War. Queen Califia, the namesake of future California, was captured, married off, and forced to forfeit her vast treasure of gold and jewels to her enemy husband and his countrymen.

Not only did these ladies comprise the earliest symbol of male society's fear of feminism, but that symbol had never been surpassed in raw power or theatrical potential. These were fearless women who dared to challenge the prevailing patriarchy. Those captured by the Greeks at Thermodon were imprisoned on ships but overwhelmed and killed the male crew. King Cyrus of Persia lost his head to Queen Thomyris. Preferring death to slavery, the Amazons refused to be exploited and took to the offensive with an energy that made Wonder Woman look like Mary Poppins.

Why it had taken Hollywood so long to turn such a fertile myth into a movie seemed a mystery, a creative oversight of the highest order. But a violent mega-moneymaker it was set to become, a blood-dripping blockbuster on the order of The Passion of the Christ.

My newest client had not failed to recognize his opportunity. It took me by surprise, yes, but then what completely original idea ever fails to grab and shake and invoke disparagement if not disgust?

While Dr. Olsen's basic concept was original to say the least, to call it ludicrous did not begin to say the most.

(continued on page two)