Better Junk and a Higher Cause
It’s a weekend morning, and you’re cruising along a residential street in your car. Up ahead is the ubiquitous garage sale. You slow down. Your car, of its own volition, pulls over to the curb.
And there you are, fingering someone else’s junk, maybe thinking of the closet at home that never did get cleaned out this summer. You buy some little thing, anyway, trying to convince yourself that this plastic hula doll will someday be a collector’s item.
We know you do this. Now we want you to do it again today. This time for a good cause.
At the Hyatt Regency Long Beach today, you’re going to find a higher quality of junk than you usually drag home--because the folks at the AIDS Assistance Thrift Store have cleaned out their storeroom.
Not only are they auctioning off items donated throughout the year, they’ve also found a few things specifically for this fund-raiser.
Here, you will find the final shooting script for Cecil B. de Mille’s 1956 classic “The Ten Commandments” and a 1940s tubular chrome and black leather Art Deco living room set. Autographed photos of the cast of television’s Murphy Brown will be next to a set of 78 r.p.m. Peggy Lee records. Two R.C. Gorman paintings, appraised at $2,500 each, will be available, as well as an autographed photo of actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, valued at $1.
“We don’t want to be too elitist,” said Norm Halbert, director of operations for the thrift store.
All in all, you’ll find about 200 items. Proceeds, like all thrift store sales, will be used to help support a variety of Long Beach AIDS and HIV service organizations. The store, almost 2 years old, offered more than $40,000 in grants last year to such groups as Baby Buddies and Friends, which helps find foster parents for infants with AIDS, and Being Alive, Long Beach, a support group for those infected with HIV.
The Santa Maria House shelter for AIDS patients and the Visiting Nurse Service, Long Beach, a nonprofit organization providing home care, also will benefit from the thrift store’s work.
The Hyatt Regency Long Beach, 200 S. Pine Drive (at Shoreline Drive), has donated three ballrooms for the event, which begins today at 2 p.m. and lasts about three hours.
Information: 987-5353.