Zero Breast Cancer provides new perspective

Art show features symbolic hats that show cancer also can evoke many positive feelings 

This is my first-ever hurry-up, wake-up and smell the roses or coffee or something-else-wonderful call-to-action.

It's all about an art exhibit.

And about hats.

But you only have two days to experience it before it disappears from The Marin Society of Artists' upper gallery, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. in Ross, adjacent to the Marin Art & Garden Center.

The exhibit, titled "The Zero Breast Cancer Hat Collection," closes Jan. 24, 2015.

So you only have tomorrow and Saturday, from noon to 4 p.m.

On display are hats — fascinating art pieces —created by the Plexus Arts Group, a slice of a 38-hat collection on loan from the permanent display housed at the Zero Breast Cancer offices, 4340 Redwood Highway, Suite C400, San Rafael.

The hats, which are a distinct pleasure to observe (and touch), are symbolic and prove to me that cancer needed be limited to negative feelings.

Items such as these assuredly can make patients and caregivers feel good.

The collection, according to the ZBC, was made in response "to the breast cancer recurrence of their fellow artist," the late Roni Peskin Mentzer. When she was re-diagnosed, the art group "wanted to do something to support her. Roni suggested that they create hats that would be beautiful pieces of art."

So they did.

My wife, Nancy Fox, heroine of my VitalityPress book, "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," which is aimed at both male caregivers and patients of any life-threatening disease, knew Roni.

She says she was "a very creative person."

ZBC regularly makes the collection available, free, to breast cancer and women's health conferences and art exhibits.