Sometime before Christmas, I found myself interviewing some women who had decided that tattooing over/around their mastectomy scars/total breast removal after cancer surgery was a great idea. It was enlightening to say the least. I pondered long and hard over how to approach the story - it's a little delicate here and there, sensitive too but the one thing I didn't want it to be was boring. Eventually, I decided I would approach it in the same spirit as they themselves approached it and it turned out just fine.

Now that both issues of the magazine have come down off the public shelves, now is a good time to post them somewhere - like here - for public consumption. The pdf files will load in your browser - if not, get a better browser. Part One is here and part two is here. Please feel free to link, share and credit accordingly.

In rummaging around in this story, I discovered that Peter Criss (original Kiss drummer) had also battled breast cancer - it's not something that you ever hear men talk about really, so thumbs up for coming out and talking about it. He didn't get back to my request to include his thoughts in the piece which is a shame but maybe he has other things to do. You can watch the youtube footage of the CNN interview here. As you'll see, the numbers are relatively low compared to that of women but make of it what you will... chances are you will know somebody, somewhere.

The most important thing to remember here is none of these people ever thought it would happen to them...

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I don't need any excuses to post a Kiss video from the good old days, but that was a good link so, er... here's one right now. If you watch through the interview (which Gene must have reviewed swiftly and decided from that day onwards to never do it like that again) to the live performance, you'll see that it must also be the production managers first day at work or maybe just the day when he found out how to switch from camera one to camera two.

How I miss you 1974 - even though I was only seven.