Fran Drescher Says “Cancer Schmancer”

Fran Drescher with her “Nanny” co-creator and gay ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson. |JAG ENTERTAINMENT

On June 19, Fran Drescher, of “The Nanny” and “Happily Divorced” TV fame, played host to a Hornblower Cruise dinner gala in support of her Cancer Schmancer Foundation.

Drescher, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate, is also a survivor of uterine cancer. In 2002, following her successful battle with the disease, she wrote “Cancer Schmancer,” a story about her survival but also her distressing experience at being misdiagnosed over a two-year period during which time she consulted with eight different doctors.

Fran Drescher (center) with Liz Callaway and Ann Hampton Callaway, the sister team who wrote “The Nanny” theme song. | JAG ENTERTAINMENT

The Cancer Schmancer Foundation takes a three-pronged approach to battling the disease, which it says will hit one out of every two men and one out of every three women in their lifetime. By encouraging early detection, many lives can be saved, and its Fran Van program offers low income, uninsured, and underinsured women in New York and Los Angeles free mammograms. Catching breast cancer early can mean a 90-percent chance of survival, the group says. The foundation’s other two initiatives are prevention, in which it focuses on environmental changes people can make in their own lives and homes to reduce risk, and policy changes, including a federal legislative effort to require carcinogenic-free labeling on food and household products.

The gala’s entertainment program included Drescher’s comedy as well as music from performers including Ann Hampton Callaway and Liz Callaway, the sister team who wrote the “The Nanny” theme song, Len Cariou, Seth Rudetsky and Jennifer Simard, Jill Whelan, who gained fame at age 10 as Vicki Stubing, the daughter of Gavin MacLeod’s Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat,” and Peter Marc Jacobson, the co-creator of “The Nanny,” who also proudly identifies as Drescher’s gay ex-husband.