Marcia Hruchison, the event's organizer, had just resigned her post as music programmer and live events producer for radio network Westwood One when she found out she had breast cancer. “Three days after producing the Grammy Webcast in 2001 – my last day of work – I had a mastectomy,” she told XBiz.
During the months of chemotherapy and rehabilitation that followed, Hruchison researched breast cancer, but something in the way the disease was handled in the press concerned her.
“I had an epiphany one day when my physical therapist brought me a little pink bear with a t-shirt and a little pink ribbon,” she said. “I thought – while bald – this isn’t me; I want to feel sexy. This is not my life or my situation. What does a pink teddy bear have to do with me or my breasts?”
As she recovered (she has now been in remission for three years), Hruchison thought about how she could raise awareness about breast cancer and realized that a major demographic had been overlooked. “Who likes breasts most?” she asked. “Straight men.” She developed a marketing plan to target the adult entertainment industry.
Jenna Jameson, whose portrait is in the exhibition as well as in the accompanying book, lent her image to BABE’s promotional poster.
Adult content provider TEN.com is the top-listed sponsor of Friday’s event, and the LA Weekly and Santa Monica’s Rockenwagner restaurant, where Hruchison works part time as a manager, signed on this month, she said. BABE is working with City of Hope Cancer Center to determine how the event’s proceeds will be distributed, because Hruchison admits that she and her staff of two “don’t know where to send the money once we get it.”
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ “30 Porn Star Portraits” will be on display until May 3. The BABE fundraiser is officially the exhibits closing party.