“My dad always said to me ‘It’s very import- ant how you dress because that’s the first thing that people see about you and that’s how they’re going to judge you right off the bat’. So he was very, very adamant about al- ways telling me that I should look my best.” Jeanne Beker is one of approximately 40 percent of Canadian women who have dense breasts. But she was not aware she had them. As a result, following current prov- incial medical recommendations, she went for mammograms only every couple of years. “It has nothing to do with the size of your breasts. Like a lot of people think, ‘Oh, you’ve got big boobs, you’ve got dense breasts.’ It has nothing to do with that. You could have very small breasts and they could still be dense.” Since her own diagnosis, Beker has be- come a spokesperson for several breast can- cer awareness groups and charities, includ- ing Dense Breasts Canada, and the breast cancer campaign called Be Your Own Breast Friend by the lingerie chain La Vie En Rose. Later this fall, on Oct. 21, she’ll be honoured at the Princess Margaret Hospital’s One Life fundraising gala in Toronto. “I’m still very much working and doing all the things that I love career-wise, but this has become a whole other arena for me, a whole other way of lending my voice to something that could really help save lives, and certainly grow awareness,” she says. And while continuing to deal with related health issues from the cancer, such as energy loss and being monitored for any side effects on her heart, she’s now admittedly living her best life. She enjoys spending time in the country, walking her dog with her partner Iain MacInnes. She also helps Bekky sell produce and greeting cards at the weekly market in Coburg. And when her TSC show took its summer hiatus, Beker doubled down in the writing of a new memoir, slated to be published by Simon
“Quick and easy! Now if only we could do something about these dowdy blue hospital gowns… “: June 5, 2023
and Schuster in November of 2024. This book will be about the stories behind some of her favourite designer clothing pieces. She’s worn a lot of them over the years. The closets of her principal residence in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood remain “stuffed” with items. While she used to donate regu- larly to the Hadassah-WIZO Bazaar, and sup- ported fundraisers for cancer charity Gilda’s House—corralling celebrity friends to make their own donations, too—she hasn’t culled her collection since the pandemic. The re- lease of her next book might be a motivator to put a few items on display.
Beker promises her next memoir will tell the story about the black velvet bell-bottom pants she wore to an interview with Ma- donna, only to arrive and discover the pop star was wearing the exact same ones. There will also be a section about one of her mother’s beloved party dresses from the 1970s, which had been sewn by a pro- fessional dressmaker. Decades later, Beker wore that same dress to a bar mitzvah and danced the night away. “I was just overwhelmed with joy think- ing about how many horas that dress had seen.” n
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