Record-busting undergarment chain to get official monument
WOONSOCKET – Most city residents who have been around long enough remember five years ago when the field at Rivers Edge Park was blanketed in a neatly coiled chain of nearly 200,000 bras to raise awareness of breast cancer.
That record-setting chain, conceived by Jennifer Jolicoeur, president and founder of Athena’s Home Novelties and its nonprofit counterpart Athena’s Cup, is now one step closer to being permanently commemorated. The City Council voted unanimously Monday to appropriate $3,000 from the city’s beautification fund for a monument statue of the goddess Athena at the park.
“It’s going to be a real symbol in the city where people can come and remember what we did here, because I certainly don’t think anyone will be breaking it anytime soon,” said Council member Garrett Mancieri, the primary sponsor on the ordinance.
The official count, certified by Guinness World Records Adjudicator Christina Flounders-Conlon, is 196,564, but Jolicoeur remembers when the chain was nothing more than a desperate desire to do something for her childhood friend Patty White and an Athena’s employee who were both diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time.
“You feel helpless when someone you love gets cancer,” Jolicoeur said. “You want to do something bigger, something more impactful.”
For weeks, Jolicoeur wracked her brain for an appropriate show of support and awareness of breast cancer. It finally hit her during a work trip in Florida. After a long day of meetings, Jolicoeur and her colleagues returned to the hotel room they were sharing, and one colleague slipped her bra out from under her shirt and tossed it on the ground, fed up with a broken and pokey underwire.
“She stomped on it, like, ‘This
stupid recalled.
She thought it was a good way to end the long day, so the rest of the group followed suit and soon had a little pile of bras in the center of the room. At some point, they began to hook the bras together to form a chain and that’s when the lightning struck.
“We honestly felt electricity in the room, like the muse had visited,” Jolicoeur said.
She began researching and discovered that a record for longest bra chain had already been set – twice. Though it was surprising to find out that creating the longest bra chain to raise awareness of breast cancer wasn’t an original idea, it was also inspiring proof that it could be accomplished. To break the most recent record, Jolicoeur and her newly established nonprofit Athena’s Cup would have to collect over 160,000 bras.
“We immediately started a campaign,” she said. “We meet thousands and thousands and thousands of women a year.”
A friend with a local design business made a flyer that could be passed out at conferences and adult parties where Athena’s ambassadors demonstrate the company’s products. Jolicoeur said that though there is stigma around her business and the idea of adult parties, Athena’s mission has always centered around education and creating an open environment to talk about sexual health, including the importance of regular breast cancer screening. Once they began describing the Athena’s Cup project, people at the parties began sharing their stories and pledging to donate their old bras.
“It was incredible the response we got from women,” Jolicoeur said.
As word spread through Athena’s national network of ambassadors, donations started coming in from all over the country, and Jolicoeur was surprised to see bras start arriving with names, letters and decorations honoring victims and survivors.
“We’d get bras that would bring us to tears,” she said. “That was like the next wave that was just astounding. These really cool things started to happen that I never could’ve imagined.”
Jolicoeur then had the idea to start bringing bras to Rhode Island ComicCon, which she had been attending for years with her children. She decided to try asking a celebrity to sign one, starting with Anthony Michael Hall, who obliged. Every year after that, she would bring bras to ComicCon and soon amassed about 500 autographed bras.
Athena’s even received a box of donated bras from the band All Time Low, which had saved every bra thrown on stage by fans during their tour one year. Some of the bras had social media handles or phone numbers written on them, so Jolicoeur’s daughter started messaging the women to let them know the bra they once sacrificed in a show of passionate fandom was now going to a good cause.
But despite the positive response and outreach, the process of collecting the donations stretched on longer than anticipated. It was a decade before Athena’s Cup had acquired enough to begin the process of breaking the world record. In that time, Jolicoeur’s childhood friend White, who inspired the effort, passed away without getting to see the chain. After her death, her family came to Athena’s with a box of her bras, and Jolicoeur made sure White’s was the first bra in the chain.
Jolicoeur had anticipated collecting the donations would be the hardest part of the project, but once she had compiled over 200,000, the Guinness World Records representatives began outlining the steps she would need to take to qualify for an official record.
“That’s when they gave us the flaming hoops to jump through.”
Having an official judge on-site the entire time was prohibitively expensive, so Jolicoeur opted instead to recruit dozens of volunteer judges, who had to be trusted members of the community under the official guidelines. She began reaching out to everyone she could think of, including then-Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, Woonsocket’s General Assembly delegation, City Council members, Police Chief Thomas Oates, then-Fire Chief Paul Shatraw and other local business owners.
“Everybody said yes to me, everybody,” she said.
Starting in October, breast cancer awareness month, Joliceuor then coordinated hundreds of volunteers and established a routine that would satisfy the documentation requirements for Guinness World Records. First, volunteer “proud hookers” would hook 10 bras into a chain, using pliers to clamp down the hooks since they were not allowed to tape or sew the chain in any way. Each segment then had to be measured individually, as every bra was a different size. The chains were then carefully rolled into a ball and put into a box.
When the box was full, it was transported to the park, where it was passed in front of the judge, who had a clicker-counter, and a judge’s assistant who was documenting each bra in the chain, all on camera. When the segment was fully documented, it was brought over to the full chain and added to the end. Jolicoeur likened the operation to an ant farm.
Constructing the chain also took longer than anticipated as the cadre of volunteers braved the variable October weather. After running into several challenges a few days in, Jolicoeur went out to dinner at Chan’s with a core group of people involved in the project, including her husband. She said he had wanted her to call it off, but she felt they were too close to quit now. They still hadn’t decided what to do when the fortune cookies arrived at the table, but when one of her friends got a fortune that simply said, “Don’t stop now,” it sealed the deal.
The fortune, which Jolicoeur still has, was just one of several “winks from the universe” – clandestine meetings, signs from beyond – that came during the week-long construction phase.
“The thing about that time in the park – the amount of magical moments that happened when we were up there was just astounding,” she said.
One example she gave was a man who was riding his bike along the bike path when he stopped to ask what everyone was working on. When a volunteer explained the project to him, he began to cry. He said his wife had recently died of breast cancer and he hadn’t been able to go through her things. The volunteer suggested that he go home and bring her bras back to the park, which he did, and he continued to come back and volunteer hooking bras together for the remainder of the project.
Other connections formed over the literal connections of one bra to another. High schoolers met seniors who taught them about what it was like working in the mills, and volunteers who started as strangers soon bonded over shared experiences.
“There was so much joy in all of it and absolute connections,” Jolicoeur said. “In the end, that’s what meant the most.”
The world’s longest bra chain is now coming up on its five-year anniversary this October. Jolicoeur said there was some talk of a monument right after the record was broken, but David Lahousse, owner of Kay’s Restaurant and a committed volunteer during the project, has been pushing for one ever since then.
The vision is for an eight-foot marble statue of the Greek goddess Athena, who is associated with wisdom and battle strategy, at the opening of Rivers Edge Park, commemorating both the achievement of the world record and the victims and survivors of breast cancer.
Even with the council’s $3,000 allocation, which still requires a second passage, Athena’s Cup will need to fundraise the balance for the statue. Mancieri said the goal amount is $10,000, which would cover the statue itself and any landscaping required after it’s installed. Any donations left over from the monument will be donated to breast cancer research.
Jolicoeur said that despite the council’s support, she has been facing strong opposition to the monument, which she said stems from the lingering stigma around her business and the adult products it offers. She said she tries to brush it off, since it’s not unlike what she experienced when she first opened in 1998.
“I would never in a million years do anything vulgar in this city I love,” she said.
People who are interested in donating for the monument can contact Athena’s Cup at 401-762-6110 or in person at the Athena’s office on 1296 Park East Drive.