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When Metairie, La., theater student Rebecca Hollingsworth left town with her boyfriend's family to escape Hurricane Katrina, she didn't think she'd be gone for long.
"In the car we were joking around," says Hollingsworth, 17. "Then we stopped at a gas station, and on the radio, it was saying they were bringing hundreds of body bags into New Orleans."
The weeks of refuge in Panama City, Fla., wouldn't be easy for Hollingsworth, whose role as Audrey in her high school's production of Little Shop of Horrors was cut short.
The apartment she shared with her mother, who stayed to weather the storm and eventually sought refuge with relatives in Louisiana, was destroyed. Hollingsworth relocated to Washington, D.C., to live with an aunt and finish her senior year of high school.
In a new city, Hollingsworth also never thought Katrina's devastation would bring her a lucky break. The same day she began classes at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, an audition-only college prep school, teachers called her to audition for a government-sponsored public service announcement on teen HIV awareness.
Having no time to prepare, Hollingsworth says she performed the same monologue that had just gained her entrance to her new school. "Because I was going through so much with Katrina and a new school, I was having sensory overload, so (at the audition) I wasn't scared," she says.
A few weeks later she learned she had landed the lead role in the PSA, as a teenager exchanging text messages with a friend about a girl who had contracted HIV after a night of partying.
"We were surprised to find that (Rebecca) had just come out of this awful hurricane situation," says Bryan Daniels, creative director of IQ Solutions, which helped cast the PSA. "She was very good at taking direction and making the story line her own. Her ability to apply herself to this so soon afterward was remarkable."
Filming was hard work. The whole PSA was shot in one 14-hour day, and it made her realize how many teenagers don't think HIV is something that could happen to them.
"When I think of unprotected sex, I think of getting pregnant; I don't think of getting AIDS," she says. "Young people need to realize how crippling this is."
The PSA has appeared on more than 20 TV stations; in January, it will be shown for two weeks on Times Square's Astrovision screen in New York City.
Although things have gone well in Washington, Hollingsworth says, the weather is "too cold," and she misses home.
After graduation, she hopes to attend Loyola University in New Orleans, Tulane University or Louisiana State University. She says she eventually wants to act full time, be a theater critic or a costume and makeup designer.
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