Freaks!! Grazie a Salvatore, possiamo salvare il photoshoot per l'Hello Magazine senza tag e in formato più grande:
Qui di seguito trovate l'intervista (presto la traduzione):
Spending time in the company of rock star Anastacia, it’s impossible not to feel exhilarated by life. A petite powerhouse - at 5ft 2in - she;s not known as “the little lady with the big voice” for nothing, she’s like an intravenous shot of positivity.
She emerges from the dressing area at HELLO!’s exclusive photoshoot in a vest top emblazoned with the slogan “Survivor Chick”. Those two work sum up why the 45-year-old former MTV dancer from Chicago, Who’s gone on to sell more than 20 million records, has become such a beacon of hope and inspiration to women, especially those battling breast cancer, a disease that she has fought twice in the past decade.
She was first diagnosed in 2003 and last year the singer revealed she had undergone a double mastectomy after being informed the disease had returned.
“Once I realised that they were with cancer again, I didn’t want them any more,” says the straight-talking singer, referring to what she touchingly calls her “broken boobies”.
“It was caught very early so it wasn’t about being rapid. It was about me knowing exactly what was going to happen and taking control. I’d known after the last time that if it came back, that was the route I would take.
“I’d had time to process that, so it wasn’t like we needed to have a funeral for them or that I felt there was some big loss. Once I knew the cancer was back, I was like, ‘Okay, then they’re not mine.’”
Diagnosed last february Anastacia was due to have her operation at the end of March but after discovering she was severely anaemic, it was delayed until May.
As fate would have it, she ended up having surgery just days before Hollywood star Angelina Jolie announced that she too had undergone a double mastectomy.
TIME TO HEAL
“I was lying in my hospital bed hooked up to an IV drip, listening to the fact that she had just had one too and it was kind of surreal,” recalls Anastacia.
“I had planned to announce mine sooner, not realising what a hard road I would go down with my recovering. So when Angelina went public and shared her journey - and she did it with such class and grace - I was like, ‘Thanks girl, you got this, the pressure’s off.’ I felt it was God’s way of telling me, ‘Take your time.’
“In hindsight, I really needed that private time to heal.”
In the end, she made her own announcement last October, during Breast Cancer Awareness month, just a couple of weeks before jointing such stars as Kylie Minogue and David Beckham at an event in Berlin, where she was presented with a humanitarian award for her commitment to raising awareness of the disease.
“Dude, I was so nervous that day my pores had pores,” recalls Anastacia, shaking her head at the memory. “I had these beads of sweat on my upper lip because it was my first appearance since the announcement and I was like, ‘Oh God, everyone’s staring.’ I felt so exposed.”
Later, she took to the stage to perform. “At that point, I’d never sung with my new boobs and they still didn’t feel like mine, so I was scared about that.
“Now they feel like mine, though,” she adds, glancing down at her chest. “They do a lovely job with reconstructions now.”
Five months on and Anastacia is in the UK to promote the release of Resurrection, her first album of original material in five years. It would be hard to imagine a more fitting title, for what an incredibly tough, turbulent and emotional five years it has been, yet Anastacia - whose name sans “resurrection” in Greek - has emerged from it all stronger and even more vibrant.
The fragility of life, how it puts other worries into perspective, her feelings about her changing body, her split from her husband - the impact of it all is there, laid bar, in the music.
MUSIC THERAPY
“I had done a lot of my healing on that score prior to writing the album” says Anastacia of her divorce from her former bodyguard Wayne Newton, whom she married in Mexico in 2007and filed for divorce from three years later.
“But there are definitely things in there that attest to the strength, the mooring and the pain of divorce; the ebbs and flows. I had such a plethora of unwritten emotions in my heat that once I opened the floodgates it all came pouring out. The songs do paint a picture of a resurrection; someone who is stripped. I know I’ve stripped myself of a lot to try to find what’s inside.”
The album was was written in the wake of her second cancer diagnosis; two of the songs on the day she got the news the disease had returned. The stirring Stay is on of them.
“It’s pretty much a song that saying I’m not ready to go just yet; not ready to die,” says Anastacia. “As I was writing it, I knew it was intense. Then I came home and played it for my sister and she cried.
“But at the same time it’s got this playful energy it’s almost kind of childlike in the music.”
Not once has she ever felt angry about getting breast cancer. Quite the reverse, she views it as “an honour”, since it has given her the opportunity to use her voice and position to encourage other women to get tested and seek the help and support they need.
“The way I see it, you’re the soldier girl who goes to the war then goes back and tells the other troops who haven’t fought the battle yet what it’s like so they can go out there and fight even better. And that’s a gift.
“That is why I have been open and honest about the disease and my treatment, because I felt that not be communicative was doing a disservice to other women.”
In the wake of her double mastectomy, she did, she believes, briefly have depression. “But only because of the painkillers," she say. “I didn’t want to take them - I’m not someone who likes to do drugs of any kind - but I had to and they can weight heavy on you after a while.
“It was the kind of pain that can drive you crazy, you know,” she adds. “I hadn’t been prepared for that.”
After the surgery, Anastacia spent 11 days in hospital, three of them unable to stand, then another seven in an aftercare facility before being allowed home. “I had my sister come stay because I was terrified of being alone,” she says.
The reconstruction surgery involved using her latissimus dorsi muscles - the broadest, strongest muscles in the bad. “Basically, my lats are now my pecs - which makes for some interesting part tricks,” smiles Anastacia. “Bust when they’d talked about moving the lats to the front, I didn’t realise that the whole area gets kind of flambéed off the bone, then starts swelling.”
THE BEST MEDICINE
Yet even as she’s telling you all this, Anastacia somehow manages to find humour in the experience. Once of her confidantes through her recovery was close friend and fellow cancer survivor Sharon Osbourne, who underwent a double mastectomy in 2012.
“Sharon’s mastectomy involved using different parts of her anatomy to what they used for mine, so while she was bent over like a little old lady, I couldn’t had been more perpendicular,” says Anastacia, acting out both postures in an exaggerated manner to hilarious effect.
“We joked that if we’d gone through it at the same time we could have been the new Abbott and Costello. I was like, ‘Seriously, I could have put everything up on the shelf and you could have picked up all my shows. Just think how useful that would have been.’ We did laugh.
“I’m not saying there aren’t tears, I’m not saying there aren’t dark times,” says Anastacia.
“But you’ve got to look at the situation and go ‘Isn’t it so much better to laugh through it?’”
And so it is that, to hoots of laughter, she describes the ‘“unveiling” of her new boobs to her closest girlfriends and gal make friends - who were all utterly transfixed.
“They were like [adopts a gaping expression], ‘Whoa, they look just like real nipples,’ and I was like, 'I know!’ then they said, ‘They’re like stripper’s boobs!’ and I said, ‘I know!’”
“My surgeon had described the process of making the nipples as being a bit like origami and, in essence, it absolutely was,” marvels Anastacia. “It really is amazing.”
Her breasts are now less than half the size they were pre-surgery. “They were 856cc each, now they’re 400cc,” she says.
“The thing about that is that the fat has got to go somewhere and for a while there, I was pilling it on in other areas, I couldn’t move too much, all I could do was eat, so whereas I used to have a six-pack, I was rocking a full pack. My choice of life is so much more impotent than my vanity but as a money, of course, you notice,”
With no chance of great cancer returning, Anastacia remains committed to helping others fight the disease. “I’d like to do conversations with big groups of women and be realistic about the situation and take the heaviness away,” she says.
On a different note almost four years on from her divorce, she’s also ready for romance. what kind of guy is she looking for? “I have no idea,” she chuckles. “Apparently, I’m all wrong when it comes to that. I think my picker’s broken. But I like looking,” she adds with a cheeky smile.
“I’m not sure if I am ready for a permanent romance but I’m ready for adventures.”
Anastacia also suffers from the digestive disorder Crohn’s disease and has a condition called supra ventricular tachycardia, which is characterised by a rapid heart beat, for which she takes medication - “Otherwise it’s like a rave in there,” she jokes. But she hasn’t given up on the idea of having a family. “I’ve always said I would love to have children , but I’m an all-or-nothing type of character and my career always took priority.
“I don’t feel that I’m at a places where I could say I won’t have any because I feel I’m still young enough to keep my options open.
“What I worry about most is the Crohn’s,” she says “You never know when you’re going to have an attack and when it does happen you’ve got t worry about feeding the baby. That;s the only thing that makes me feel like having a cild myself might not be ideal.
“But that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t go down the route of adoption or having a baby by surrogate. All those thing have been in my head,” she adds.
“When I first listened back to the new album, it was only then that it struck me how much I’ve grown up in the past five years. I’d been interested to see what might come out and I was like, ‘Oh my God. I think I’m a little bit grounded.’
“I’m grateful that I was able to take my time with it and not feel rushed; to write as I was healing. But ultimately, I’m grateful to be alive. That’s all I was asking for."
Andrea
