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Laura Hudgens realizes it was all a fluke.
She wasn’t one to regularly check her breasts. At 26, she spent her days more focused on her training specialist job at a real estate company and on having fun with friends.
Then, last October, she discovered a lump.
“I found it. And I sat there. It (cancer) crossed my mind,” she said. “I Googled ‘lumps’ but I was like, ‘What’s a lump?’ Then, I was like, ‘No way. I’m so young and this doesn’t even run in my family.”‘
Then again, she still wondered: What if?
Hudgens decided to wait until a scheduled physical the next month to ask her doctor, who suggested she see a specialist.
A biopsy in December confirmed the news she had thought to be unfathomable: She had breast cancer at 26.
Her family and friends were just as shocked. “I think everybody just assumes that it happens to older women,” said Kathy Menis of Barrington, Hudgens’ older sister.
But they quickly rallied around her.
“From hearing people cry, I knew I had to be positive. I didn’t want to bring them down,” said Hudgens, a Des Plaines native.
“No one knows what to say. But at that point, it kind of just turned into… ‘I can’t sit here and feel sorry for myself. I have to be strong and fight it.’”
Menis wanted to do something to show her younger sister that she had a strong base of emotional support to lean on.
She proposed a party with the theme of reaching for the stars, like a cosmonaut, before Hudgens underwent her mastectomy in January.
Menis wanted to send her sister the message: “We’re going to be here for you Laura and we’re going to reach up as high as we can.”
Using the cosmonaut theme also was a play on words — they would toast with cosmopolitans.

dailyherald.com

The striking 21-year-old singer, dancer and actress grew up performing in the Sarasota area before moving to Miami for college. She’s been singing since she was a toddler in a musical family that included three sisters and mother Zelda, a former Motown backup singer.
As a child, Syesha — it’s pronounced “sigh-EE-sha” — sang in church and grew accustomed to performing in public — she once sang the national anthem at a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. Her turns in musicals such as
Seussical: The Musical at a Sarasota arts high school drew raves. She’s acted in commercials, sang in a band, won a car in a statewide singing contest and even appeared briefly on a reality TV show.
So nobody back home is surprised that she’s standing among the final 11 on the Fox TV show that has the potential to make her a household name. And, they say, it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
“When she was going to high school, she was aspiring to do that kind of thing. I remember she and her friends talking about it,” said Johnnie Mnich, theater director in the elite performing arts program at Booker High School. “I think it was a matter of time before it happened. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she’s good at.”
Mnich recalls marveling at Mercado’s talent when the she won the lead in the musical
Once on This Island as a sophomore.
“I was just blown away,” he said. “I was amazed at the level of expertise and strength and training.”
Bruce Merkle, 20, spent all four years in the Booker arts program acting and singing with Mercado. They shared their first stage kiss in
Once on This Island.
“She’s sounded like that since she was 14, as long as I can remember,” said Merkle, now a stage actor and still close friends with Mercado. “She’s the real deal. And she’s genuinely a nice person. She’s very grounded and knows what she wants.”

sun-sentinel.com

On this day in 1881, Vice President Chester Arthur broke a 37-37 tie to cast the deciding vote over competing Republican and Democratic slates of Senate committee chairmen and members. But the Democrats refused to budge on replacing the officers they had chosen in the previous Congress. The ensuing stalemate froze Senate business for the next two months.
The Senate had convened in a special session to deal with nominations for federal office submitted by James Garfield, the newly inaugurated president. In November 1880, the Garfield-Arthur ticket had won the White House by fewer than 10,000 votes.
Soon Republicans split over the issue of filling the New York customs post Arthur once held. Sen. Roscoe Conkling (R-N.Y.) held that senators should exercise personal control over federal appointments within state boundaries. Conkling had resisted efforts by the prior Republican president, Rutherford Hayes, to enact civil service reforms.
In response to Garfield’s failure to take the New York senators into account, both Conkling and Thomas Platt, New York’s new junior senator, resigned in May. They anticipated the New York legislature would soon reelect them and, in so doing, send the White House a message about how to deal with powerful senators. But that did not happen.
Their resignations gave the Democrats a two-vote Senate majority. In the spirit of compromise, the Democrats agreed not to press their numerical advantage and did not insist on resuming control of committees. In return, the Republicans allowed the Democratic staff holdovers to remain in office, at least until the next session.
After Garfield’s assassination in September, the Senate halted its internal management battle. Arthur moved into the White House to begin a surprisingly able run in the presidency.
People still listen when Greenspan speaks; AP reports U.S. military will soon suffer 4,000th death of Iraq war. Check out the most recent edition of Playbook.

politico.com