Celeb: Oscar-winning actress Mira Sorvino, best known for hits like the late-’90s “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” and Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite.”
Cause: Research and funding for metastatic, or stage IV, breast cancer, meaning cancer that has spread beyond the breast to other organs. Sorvino frequently teams up on the issue with her longtime pal Champagne Joy, the oft-rainbow-wigged breast cancer patient and founder of the irreverent website Cancerland.
Scene: Sorvino (business casual in a beige lace top and black pants, accessorized with a camera she used to snap pics of the demonstration), Joy and other activists marched from the Washington Monument to Capitol Hill, where they staged a “die-in” on the Capitol’s west lawn. The “Stage IV Stampede” participants then convened in the Cannon House Office Building for a rally and briefing. Then it was off to meet with lawmakers to lobby for boosting National Institutes of Health budgets, loosening right-to-try laws (which allow terminally ill patients to try experimental therapies), and shortening the hold time on disability benefits for cancer patients.
Sound bite: “In the back of your mind you wonder, ‘One day am I going to find a lump, and then my kids are going to have a mother who’s dying?’ Every woman thinks about this, so we should all be banded together in this sisterhood that this is not acceptable, that this is a priority in our country to eliminate metastatic breast cancer,” Sorvino said. “This is not this fairy tale where if we do a 10k run, it’s been eliminated.”
This article was originally published at the “Article” source noted above and distributed by The Tutu Project for informational purposes only.
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