Amazon

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efore I could get him to elaborate, he insisted upon making a big fuss over the fact that he was not asking a woman to 'cut off' a breast and demanded that I quit referring to his operation as 'deforming'. The procedure, he said, was designed to delicately suck away the internal breast tissue while leaving the overlying skin and nipple fully intact, no more than a breast reduction taken to the max. If a patient had a facelift and didn't like the look, she was more or less stuck with the it. Not so here, where the outcome was reversible with implant surgery. "For Christ's sake," he said, "it's not like she's having a sex change."

"So then, how would you prefer I call it? Chest beautification or maybe demolition and remodeling?" "That's an issue for my smartass marketing expert," he said. "By now, I would have thought she'd given due consideration to the issue of branding."

And I had. He'd explained to me earlier that when new cosmetic treatments came to market they usually sported trendy names intended to downplay their seriousness, names that sounded vaguely French or fluffy, often fun and airy. 'Mastoplasty,' 'amastia,' or 'subcutaneous mammary resection' were not about to cut it with the consumer.

Now he looked at me as if I was about to present him with a list of inspired choices, some catchy tags that he could trademark to protect the operation and use in licensing all of the product spin-offs like special bras, swim suits, and evening wear that were going to make us rich. So I lit up with a confident smile and shot back with the only pathetic option I'd really considered.

"Reform," I said, and then typed it out on my computer screen using flowery script and breaking the word into two pieces by placing a bold dot between the e and f: Re•Form. "Helps with the pronunciation," I said, "and gives it a little flare."

He asked me what it meant. Fortunately, this wasn't the first time I'd been through this firing-line exercise, tossing out pure nonsense and then investing it with meaning. I turned to him confidently as my hair fell across my face. "What else? Right endoscopic feminizing reduction mastoplasty."

He stared back at the screen. "What about the O?"

I'd overlooked the O, but that part was easy. "Come on, doctor, it's okay to drop the false modesty. The O is all you, your proprietary imprint and claim to fame. Re•Form — right endoscopic feminizing Olsen reduction mastoplasty — a new operation to reform, as in reshape, the female torso as well as to reform, as in update, the sicko definition of female beauty now so fixated on two glands protruding from a woman's chest."

"Hm, I don't know."

"Why not? I mean, it's all there — the fashion statement, the political statement, the sociological, the medical, even the controversial — all distilled into one short word easy enough to remember after hearing it only once. Give something this fertile to our graphic designers and they'll draw you a logo to die for. Re•Form: Reshape and Update — which happens to be our new slogan. Come on. The name almost incites a call to action."

He closed his eyes and I expected him to start laughing. Suddenly, he jumped up and let out a hoot. "Honey, you are one fucking genius! That's brilliant! Totally brilliant. Now I see why you people can charge so goddamn much."

I waited for him to calm down and stop smiling. "Now it's my turn," I said. "What exactly did you mean when you suggested we commingle the worlds of entertainment and beauty?"

"Let's put that one off till I get back some photos I can show you. Dinner at seven tomorrow, hon, and then two or three hours of brainstorming. And bring along this friend of yours, even if he has to wear a bag over his head. I don't need to know his name but I do want to meet him."

"He happens to be a she," I said. "And why do you have to meet her in person?"

"Because starting very shortly this doctor's ass goes on the line."

I was always a 'sweetie' or 'hon', but he was always the 'doctor'.  I guess that said it all.

We'd each finished two drinks and were tired of waiting on our server. "Doctor," Joanie said before I could clamp my hand over her alcohol-loosened mouth, "how dare you ask a healthy young lady to remove one of her God-given breasts?"

Dr. Olsen looked up from his third pink Matterhorn martini. "You've got in all backwards, dear. The young ladies are the ones asking me."

"Is that so?" Joanie said to him, their eyes locked onto each other's like two wrestlers ready to pounce. "Does that imply that you've already perpetrated this atrocity on somebody?"

Oh, yes, Dr. Olsen said proudly, on over fifty women with strong histories of aggressive familial breast cancer, none of whom had sought the operation for any reason other than as a preventative. None, that is, until patient #42, who just happened to be a celebrity.

"Who?" Joanie and I asked simultaneously.

"Sorry," Dr. Olsen said, "haven't you ever heard of patient confidentiality?" He then dismissed it one of his stupid smiles, swore us to secrecy, and proceeded to unveil his most clever plan for achieving a major marketing impact with minimal monetary expenditure.

With the devaluation of the natural world, I suppose it was all but inevitable that something like this was bound to happen.

More than a powerful commercial force, marketing is one of the black arts. If we'd been able to convince the public that it was okay to pollute Mother Earth in the name of corporate profits, how hard was it going to be persuade the bimbos of Middle America to corrupt their measly bodies?

Yes, it was possible. We could beckon people to any cause.

McDonalds and Phillip Morris – these are not exactly health food companies and yet our work had turned them into giants. But Madison Avenue in bed with the beauty surgeons? Why not? It was just one black art form mating with another.

When Dr. Olsen revealed to us that Lady G was in his camp, we were stunned.

Godiva, or Lady G as she was often called in reference to the fabled Lady Godiva who rode nude on horseback to protest high taxes, was a pop singer famous for appearing nude on her first album cover with only her hair obscuring a full view of her ample bosom. Her Halloween photo spread in Playboy had helped the magazine sell its third most monthly issues, after which she'd come to be viewed as an almost archetypal dark earthy goddess.

Her early albums had gone platinum, and her international concert tours sold out in hours.

She'd become an MTV icon and her place in entertainment lore seemed assured for decades, her name having grown synonymous with aggressive female sexuality.

But there was more to it. Godiva, now age 36, had grown terrified over the prospect of developing breast cancer, a disease that had killed her mother, two aunts, and her only sister before the age of 40. She wanted her breasts off, but with a body so public, any noticeable deformity would all but guarantee her demise.

"Hold on," Joanie said. "Are you gonna tell us that you cut off her breasts?"

"Please, sweetie, let's just say I reformed her."

I interrupted "Dr. Olsen, is she willing to endorse your skill or give us a testimonial about your integrity as a surgeon?"

"Far better than that," he said. Still gorgeous, Lady G was aging up, her star power was on the wane, and free publicity was getting harder to come by. "She's agreed to be our spokesperson."

Our dinner meeting progressed exceptionally well. Both Joanie and I were astonished by the doctor's determination. When he asked in passing if Joanie could arrange for a television talk show appearance by Lady G a few weeks after Amazon hit the theaters, Joanie was so giddy she claimed she could do so with a single phone call.

I think Dr. Olsen won her over by pointing out a few truisms he claimed became obvious to any doctor who did cosmetic surgery for a living. For one thing, the public now viewed major cosmetic revision of their bodies just as mainstream as eating apple pie.

"Reform is not at all as atrocious as you were making it sound," he said. "How do you think people reacted the first time some progressive doctor suggested peeling back the skin of a woman's face, stretching it around her ears, and chopping off a couple of inches?"

"But you talk about this boob thing so casually," she said. "This is closer to mutilation than beautification. There's a difference, you know."

"Not really," he said. "Think back to the primitive women who elongated their necks with a stack of metal rings or the Pacific Islanders who inserted seashells into their lips to stretch them to ten times normal size. Whether they were monsters or sirens depends fully on your point of view. The concept that what's beautiful is predetermined is pure fallacy. The goal of a good cosmetic surgeon is to give beauty a form."

Joanie mulled it over. "Pooie! None of the women I know will be signing up to be mangled."

"Maybe not right off," he said, "but they will after we move the definition of beauty forward. It's all a matter of perception, and perception is most influenced by . . . education, shall we say. If the eye can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend, then it's your job to do a little brainwashing."

Both of us went quiet, not sure whether he'd just insulted our profession and/or challenged our personal code of ethics.

"After all," he said, "what more is beauty than the unusual? Everybody is having something done to themselves nowadays, so why not make that something a little different? The ordinary is the very definition of mundane. Not unattractive, but likewise not the less bit attractive, a state that screams out to be ignored."

"The human body is now malleable," he said. "We can either shape it to conform to the fashion industry's ideal of thin, pristine, and sexy or we can help women just like you to use their bodies to reflect what's truly inside. Really, it's an untapped frontier."

Joanie face and fist tightened as if for some reason she'd taken deep offense. "You know what, doctor? You're just too damn far ahead of your time."

"No, hon, you're too damn far behind. Look at you — snipped and tucked and sucked until you look like a sex object made solely for a man's pleasure. Proportions of your sort are a novelty, something you find naturally only in that rare person whose tape measurements fall well outside of any known bell shaped curve, a thin-boned freak with those big bouncing breasts of yours and a itty-bitty waist, a one-in-a-million natural anomaly that you and all your insecure friends have to ape."

As our waiter arrived with our dinners, Joanie said, "Thanks for a lovely evening, Dr. Know-It-All, but for some reason my appetite went away." She stood up and walked out.

I stayed behind to mitigate the damage and assess whether I still wanted to continue our association. "Why do you always have to come on so strong?" I said. "Are you that insecure about what you're doing or just nervous about working with women? "

When he didn't answer, I pointed out something he probably already knew. Poster child, maybe, but spokeswoman, no way. Lady G was a dud, a woman of near normal intelligence at best and not a verbal person. She'd grown up dirt-poor in Appalachia and dropped out of high school. Before hitting it big as a singer, she'd worked as a stripper. None of this was a secret. While her stage voice might convey power and confidence, her grasp of basic grammar and diction was poor, her speaking voice twangy, and her accent rural, characteristics not the least bit appealing to our target audience of beauty sophisticates.

"Don't worry," Dr. Olsen said, "television is a low-brow medium. We're not catering to Gloria Steinham."

"Who said anything about TV but you? You couldn't afford thirty seconds on the Weather Channel."

"Let the snotty little feminist set it up. Maybe your friend was only boasting, but now you can call her bluff." He opened his briefcase and pulled out a large envelope. Lady G had already posed for a photo shoot in the nude with only a scarf of black silk for cover, like a fan dancer of old revealing only what she wanted while leaving the rest to the imagination. The proofs looked spectacular, but her left breast was still there.

"I thought you took off both to prevent her from getting cancer."

"I did. Her left side I implanted with silicone, but that's a medically-privileged detail that only her surgeon needs to know."

"Okay, I agree she looks great. But even if she never utters a word, she a problematic cheerleader. The lady's built her career around her body, which you've misinterpreted as a plus. Why? Because she's done it in entirely the wrong way, as a willing object of sexual exploitation rather than as, say, an exercise instructor. If you try to use her image to associate Re•Form with female solidarity, she'll make you look like a clown. Godiva's the sort of woman who might get away with flashing her breast at the Super Bowl, but she'll get eaten alive on late night TV."

"Do you have a better suggestion?" he said.

I didn't, and so we ate quickly and in silence. Once I got home, I phoned Joanie and worked at calming her down. We talked for several hours and finally agreed on either Letterman or Leno.

During the next month, I was busy with the Eveready Energizer account and devoted almost no time to Dr. Olsen.

He worked hard on posting anonymous hints regarding female unity on cosmetic surgery online message boards. Based on a sample I provided. he assembled a press kit we could mass mail to the tabloids and magazines focused on fitness, beauty, and most of all on teeny-boppers. His goal was to create a lost-cost buzz that then spread across the Internet like a virus.

Joanie called twice and both times sounded worried. Two test showings of the finalized Amazon had proved highly disappointing. The film had somehow shed its epic quality and now came across as overly melodramatic or even comical to some viewers, like the bimbos versus the meatheads.

With its opening already scheduled, the studios laid the blame squarely on the inexperience of Natasha, their young director, and prepared to cut their losses. A sneak peek at comments by three major reviewers confirmed that the movie was headed nowhere.

I mentioned none of this to Dr. Olsen, who by now was fully committed financially with no way of turning back. He seemed to grow a bit manic if not delusional and kept talking about reiterating the gruesome until it grew so familiar it implanted itself into the cultural mindset, subverted intellectual resistance, and subconsciously determined new behavior.

I got sick of listening to him and even wondered if he might be mentally ill rather than simply a greedy bastard. He appeared visibly upset when he learned that at the last moment the movie's premier had been moved out of Hollywood and up north to sleepy Santa Barbara.

Without asking my advice, he took matters into his own hands.

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