Countywide : Quilt Memorializing AIDS Victims Shown

“I Alone” was all it said. But for its pure starkness, the coffin-sized patchwork, spray-painted on a sheet by a dying person, stood out Friday among the pieces of a huge quilt memorializing AIDS victims worldwide.

From such simple farewells to intricately sewn tomes about lost loved ones, 666 quilt panels went on exhibit for the first full day Friday at UC Irvine’s Student Center, where scores of people paid an emotional visit.

“I haven’t cried that hard in a long time,” said a red-eyed Mary Susan Sterner, smoking a cigarette outside the exhibit. “I don’t know if I can handle going back in.”

The crowd was lighter than hoped for, but organizers expect the biggest turnout for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt today, when the university celebrates its 25th birthday with an all-day medieval fair. As many as 20,000 visitors are expected at the sprawling campus.

“The birthday celebration gives us a real opportunity to have other people (who might not otherwise be on campus) see the quilt and what it’s all about,” said David Souleles, director of UC Irvine’s sexual health program.

This is the second time since last August that the exhibit of handmade quilt panels--part of a larger quilt memorializing 14,000 AIDS victims internationally--has visited Orange County.

Families and friends of those who have died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome have created fanciful 3-by-6-foot cloth tributes to their loved ones. Once dedicated at special ceremonies like one held at UC Irvine on Thursday night, the panels are stitched to others in what has been billed as the world’s largest community arts project.

Launched in 1987 as an international memorial to AIDS victims, the huge quilt is exhibited in gigantic chunks throughout America and abroad. It is also designed to work as a powerful “but non-threatening” public awareness tool, said Phillip Sontag, a spokesman for the project’s Orange County chapter.

“Part of the mission is to educate people that not just gay people die of this disease,” Sontag added.

That painful truth was born out on Cynthia Moran’s quilt piece, dotted with alphabet letters and illustrations of Snow White and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Dark-eyed and missing her front baby teeth, she died last June 29, three days before her eighth birthday. Beside pictures of her in frilly pink frocks and pigtails, a member of her “foster family” wrote: “Tu Madre, todos nosotros te llevamos en el corazon, mi amor Cynthia-Nena” (“Your mother and all of us carry you in our hearts, my love Cynthia”).

Some chose to remember loved ones with whimsy. One man’s name was spelled out in Scrabble tiles. Another man was memorialized with his complete sky-diving suit on the quilt. “Woosh!” said another panel. “Next stop Fantasia! See you there!”

Sterner had driven up from San Diego with five friends to visit the exhibit. The mental-health worker, a lesbian, said she photographed some of the quilt panels to show friends who could not attend.

“I think the one I liked best,” she said, “is the one that said ‘I gave a little bit of my anger, but all of my love.’ ”

For her friend Jack Colern, 38, an alcoholism counselor who tested HIV-positive two years ago but has no AIDS symptoms, seeing the quilt panels was particularly powerful. His roommate died of AIDS in February, and he had just learned that a former lover succumbed to the disease days ago. “It was overwhelming,” he said.