CR | Page No. 22 | Winter 2009
to share her cancer survivorship
story. She was recently featured in
the Weekly Reader, a classroom
magazine for kids, and she appears
in an interactive multimedia CD-ROM that includes conversations
with teen and child cancer
survivors. She was also pictured in
The Next Step: Crossing the Bridge
to Survivorship, a book co-written
by Shad, which discusses childhood
cancer survivorship and the late
effects of cancer treatment.
A flair for the dramatic makes
Kara a natural storyteller—not to
mention a consummate entertainer.
She can do a wicked Baltimore
accent, for instance, courtesy of
her mother, who was born there.
“You have to say Bal’more, not
Bal-ti-more,” Kara explains. She’s
an animated speaker, bouncing in
her seat when she gets excited, with
her long earrings swinging—“I’m a
jewelry freak,” she admits—and tiny
hands swooping through the air to
punctuate her stories.
apart. I would wake up screaming
and begging for mercy,” she told
the audience. “No living thing on
earth deserves the kind of pain and
suffering and misery that comes
with brain cancer.”
Simple words, perhaps, but they
were especially moving. “There
was not a dry eye in the house,”
recalls Gordon Howard, a vice
president of CVS Pharmacy and
a board member of Georgetown
Pediatrics, who first met Kara at
the event. “She really captured you.
She brought you into her story. You
could feel her emotions. You really
felt grateful for the people she was
acknowledging—the doctors and
other people at Georgetown, her
mom and dad.”
Kara is in increasing demand
Wackiness works for Kara.
Though she has the ethereal looks
of a storybook angel—big sky-blue
eyes, fine golden hair, delicate
ivory skin—she can easily act like
a charming goofball. At Camp
Fantastic, a summer program for
child and teen cancer survivors,
she enthusiastically leads younger
kids in improvised spirit songs
and chants. On Bonkers Day, they
all wear clothes backward and
upside down. Last year she found
herself in the camp talent show
sporting a floppy hat and feather
boa and singing a bebop version of
“Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.” “It was a
wild bunch of kids,” Kara says with
a laugh. “It was so fun.”
This year she’ll appear in
two plays at the Lab School
of Washington, where she is a
sophomore. She plays a bustling
Southern maid in You Can’t Take
It With You and stars as a wealthy
socialite in the Marx Brothers’
screwball comedy Animal Crackers.
Like any skilled actress, she has
a nuanced view of her character.
“I’m not stupid at all but just very
clueless,” she says of her starring
role as Mrs. Rittenhouse. “I’m a
good person but very oblivious to
my surroundings.”
She shows similar insight
related to real-life characters. She
understands, for instance, how
some kids could unthinkingly slap a
hurtful label onto cancer survivors.
“It’s not in a rude way usually,” she
