Cancer's New Pitch

Sept. 3, 2007 issue - Two summers ago a group of Philadelphia-area women who were preparing for the Breast Cancer 3-Day charity walk met to decide their team name. Kelly Rooney, then a 42-year-old with five children and stage-three breast cancer, tossed out an idea: how about "Save 2nd Base," a playful allusion to that quaint high-school system in which the bases signify the progression from kissing to sex? Rooney designed a T shirt, drawing two baseballs at breast level above the slogan. By the time of the fund-raiser Rooney was too sick to walk, but her teammates wore the shirts—and many spectators commented on how much they loved the idea. So Rooney's sister Erin O'Brien Dugery and friend Kelly Day spent close to $10,000 to trademark the Save 2nd Base tagline and began selling the T shirts online and in boutiques (total sales so far: 1,000). "We can't keep them in stock—they're catching on like fire," says Jen Dailey at People People, a boutique in Stone Harbor, N.J. The women selling the shirts have pledged that after they earn back the money they've invested, 50 percent of profits will go to a breast cancer foundation set up in memory of Rooney, who died last summer.
The 2nd Base shirts aren't the only edgy brand of breast-cancer apparel out there. Since 2004, Los Angeles designer Julie Fikse has sold more than 80,000 shirts carrying variations on the message "Save the Ta-Tas"—and donated $80,000 of her profits to breast-cancer charities. Both slogans garner mostly chuckles and enthusiasm, though a few people have reacted negatively, criticizing them as too crude. (To counter that, Dugery and Day launched a more demure line carrying the slogan "S2B.")

Most people under 60 understand what "second base" means, but the motto creates occasional confusion: Dailey recalls watching an American teenager use pantomime to explain the concept to a Japanese foreign-exchange student, and Dailey had to provide a definition for her sixtysomething mother. But usually, "when someone reads it, they get it, they start laughing," says Dugery, co-owner of the company behind the shirts. And in the face of a devastating disease, a little laughter can feel like a home run.

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