David Waggoner's Frontdesk
Oce upon a time in the west, there was a monstrous disease called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. And then it became slim’s disease. And then it became a worldwide plague. And then, for lack of caring, it became but another problem, a tired cause, and just another ribbon to wear—if worn at all. Although Hollywood and Broadway scarcely wear the AIDS awareness brand at public functions anymore, it still carries weight in the hearts of those who’ve not forgotten the devastation that the Big Bad Wolf has brought upon the creative communities in the United States and elsewhere.
You would think that keeping a memory alive would be easy enough in an age of reruns, one YouTube posting away. This month’s cover story, never one to wear her heart on her sleeve, has been introduced to audiences around the world as well as the youth of today. She’s the actress who played the perfect sidekick character to Mary Tyler Moore’s, and then won a show of her own that won our hearts over for her irascible and individually-minded TV persona. The name of that actress is Valerie Harper, perhaps better known to millions who see her every day in reruns as Rhoda Morgenstern. Sometimes an actor becomes the role she plays, and that would fit Ms. Harper almost as well as the nearly impossible-looking wedding dress fit her when she was late to her own wedding and had to jump over turnstiles on the New York City subway. Those are the sorts of images that can never be erased from our memory banks—at least those of us whose adolescence was spent in the anxious seventies—and can even become iconic all over again. Rhoda gave up wearing funky, multicolored bandannas a long time ago, but they’ve made a comeback as a fashion trend in such diverse places as Seventeen magazine and MTV.
If only diseases such as AIDS were as easily remembered. And that is a point that Valerie Harper makes when she says: “Michael Bennett [director and choreographer of A Chorus Line] and I danced in the chorus together in ‘Subways Are for Sleeping.’ He was eighteen and just off the bus from Buffalo...so many have died. AIDS has just cut a swath through my community of creative people...in the beginning they were calling it a homosexual disease. My mother’s a nurse and at the time she said, ‘No! People have been dying of this for a long time.’” And in every walk of life, for that matter.
As much as we need to never forget about AIDS, the disease can never become a repeat—the same old story, its subplots deleted to make room for more commercial breaks. And dwelling on the past will get us nowhere; forever mourning what we should have done to lessen its contemporary destruction is a fool’s errand. Learning from our mistakes only makes sense if that learning is applied to what’s going on in today’s world.
For Valerie, and so many others, stopping AIDS means starting with the basics. With the Hunger Project, the organization that she works with, Valerie helps people figure out how to meet their needs—hunger, shelter, health—and then how to do it again tomorrow. Through self-empowerment and a little outside support, those affected by the pandemic work toward sustainability. HIV care—like HIV prevention—is no one-shot inoculation but requires constant attention and long-term memory. Likewise, the organizations and individuals featured in our annual Holiday Gift Guide seek to remind us that the calendar pages of AIDS keep on flipping.
Fairy tales demand resolution, but for now we are still in the forest, looking out for monsters and looking for the trails of bread crumbs that will deliver us to safety. The end of AIDS will be a happy day, though made bittersweet with the memory of those lost along the way.
October 2007
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