Frenchie Davis, a former American

For Frenchie Davis, performing in the Broadway version of the play “Rent,” a story of young people with HIV and AIDS, helped her deal with the loss of a college friend who died from the disease.

Davis, the one-time “American Idol” contestant, had a close friend at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who died from complications of AIDS six months after she started performing in “Rent.”

“Being in the show really helped me grieve,” Davis said.

The singer and performer spoke to a group of about 60 Kansas University students at Hashinger Hall on Friday night as part of the student-sponsored “15 seconds” campaign.

The campaign is so named because a statistic revealed that someone younger than 25 contracts HIV every 15 seconds.

So it was a natural fit to have Davis come to KU as a performer for “Rent,” which documents the lives of young people in the late 1980s and early 1990s who live with the disease.

“Being in ‘Rent’ is like doing HIV/AIDS awareness every day,” she said.

For Cody Charles, a KU graduate student who was co-chairman of the 15 seconds campaign, it took as little as a message out of the blue to Davis’ MySpace profile to get her to come to Lawrence.

“Oh, there’s no way she’s going to respond,” Charles said of the moment he sent her the message. “Within an hour, she said, ‘This is something I would like to do.'”

Davis was a fan favorite on “American Idol” in 2003 but was jettisoned from the show because of revealing photos on a Web site that she had taken to earn money while she was in college.

She acknowledged to the students that was a controversial decision.

“People who have opinions don’t write me a check to pay tuition,” she said of the controversy that ensued after she was dropped from the show.

The event was to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS and was expected to raise money for the Douglas County AIDS Project to provide free HIV tests.