Gilda Radner’s club for cancer victims is on its way to St. Louis
By Christy Marshall
Recently a young man walked into the office of Dr. Madhavi Kandula, a dermatologist. He held one baby in his arms. Another tugged on his pant leg. He had lost his wife to melanoma. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know how I am going to go on,’’’ Kandula recalls. “You can’t see something like that and not do something. You cannot not be affected. It would be shameful not to react.”
After the AMC Cancer Research Center voted last year to shut down its regional office in St. Louis, members of the 20-year-old volunteer organization had zip to do—at least for the nanosecond before they regrouped and decided to bring to town Gilda’s Club. The organization—co-founded by actor Gene Wilder in honor of and in keeping with the wishes of his late wife, comedienne Gilda Radner, who succumbed to ovarian cancer in 1989—is designed to help cancer victims and their families and friends, people like the widower in Kandula’s office.
Virginia McDowell, current president of the AMC Cancer Research Center (as well as an executive with Trump Casinos in Atlantic City, a resident of Chesterfield and a cancer survivor), has teamed up with Kandula to lead the charge and, with other former members of the local AMC board, to raise the funds. In September, they received approval from the national Gilda’s Club board to start a provisional affiliation here (www.gildasclubstl.org is set to launch this winter).
The organization will be headquartered in a yet-to-be-built clubhouse that will be at least 10,000 square feet and have a large kitchen, a “Noogieland” playroom for children, rooms for art, wellness and support groups, exercise and private meditation—and the trademark red front door. The setup is the same for every Gilda’s Club.
To shed its provisional status, the St. Louis group must build the clubhouse and get the club up and running within 36 months. “We won’t need three years,” McDowell declares—and she’s probably right. Take a look at the David C. Pratt Cancer Center at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center or stroll into the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and you’ll see: Big bucks are going toward anything and anyplace that fights the disease. McDowell agrees but points out that Gilda’s Club is completely different.
“The one thing that Gilda Radner was absolutely adamant about was that the Gilda’s Clubhouses not be clinical, because if you walk into a clinic, any way you look at it—even if it is a spa—you still feel sick,” McDowell says. “This is a place that is independent of the clinical environment. It is a place that feels like home.”
