For AIDS Patients-- With Love, Aunt Bee’s

Aunt Bee’s is not one of the glitzier stops on the AIDS charity circuit. It’s a bare-bones thrift store along a fairly dingy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard near Gower Street in Hollywood. The prices are great, though, which is why the place is bustling on a midweek afternoon.

Amid the used clothes and household effects are some unusual finds: a flouncy chiffon gown once owned by Peggy Lee; a pair of hand-painted kimonos stitched with 14-karat gold thread.

But those touches are not what makes Aunt Bee’s so special. What separates Aunt Bee’s from other secondhand stores is what goes on in the back, behind the stacks of used linens, mismatched porcelain and old toasters.

Seven days a week, three washing machines and a commercial dryer vibrate and hum as volunteers sort, wash and fold the laundry of people too sick to do it for themselves: people dying of AIDS.

“I have lost a lot of friends to AIDS,” said Miki Jackson, 42, a longtime political activist and graphic designer who founded Aunt Bee’s and serves as its executive director.

“And one thing I know from taking care of people in the last stages is, you stand in front of the washing machine all day, because people get horrible sweats, and they get incontinent at times, and they just make a mass of laundry.”

All of the store’s merchandise is donated; the aim, eventually, is to cover the rent and other expenses with sales.

It is a decidedly unglamorous way to serve a needy population. Said Jackson: “We can’t promise anyone parties with movie stars.”

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To claim the operation is without pizazz, though, would be disingenuous.

After all, singer Peggy Lee heads Aunt Bee’s honorary board of directors. And Lee was responsible not only for recruiting singer Johnny Mathis, interior designer Mario Buatta and composer Cy Coleman to the honorary board, she also secured a $10,000 donation from the foundation of her late friend, tobacco heiress Doris Duke.

“Peggy Lee thought the laundry was the greatest idea,” Jackson said. “She got it right away. I mean, she grew up in North Dakota and knows what it’s like to do wash.”

Jaime Vidales, on the other hand, never did a load of wash until he was a grown man. Now, however, he spends every Tuesday afternoon at Aunt Bee’s, making his way through anywhere from six to nine loads.

“I always wanted to help, to do some kind of volunteer work,” said Vidales, 38. “And I know this sounds corny, but I do it because it feels good.”

Aunt Bee’s, modeled on a 5-year-old service in San Diego called Auntie Helen’s Fluff ‘n Fold, serves about 40 clients. Jackson hopes to triple the number in the next few months, once she replaces the trio of home-style washers with industrial machines.

It took Jackson and many others, including gay-rights activist Morris Kight, nearly two years to raise the $12,000 it took to open Aunt Bee’s.

“Any project with plumbing is real expensive,” Jackson said. “It’s not like support groups and help lines, where all you need is a desk and a telephone. If there is such a thing as a volunteer plumber, I have never heard of one.”

Jackson has no trouble finding folks to help with laundry and thrift-store duties--there are about 30 regular volunteers--but very few are interested or able to pick up and deliver the laundry.

“We are so grass roots and shoestring it’s ridiculous,” Jackson said, “but we have scrimped and saved and begged enough that we will be able to hire someone to pick up and deliver loads two or three days a week.”

Such victories may not seem like much in the great scheme of the war on AIDS, but they make a critical difference in a place like Aunt Bee’s.

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It takes a few minutes for Joe Popenoe, who turned 35 on Friday, to get to the phone. Sick with AIDS for the last two years, he is quite weak and unable to care for himself. He has been a client of Aunt Bee’s for several months, ever since reading about the laundry service in a magazine.

Before he contacted Aunt Bee’s, Popenoe said, he didn’t do laundry at all.

“I wore the same dirty clothes for a long time,” he said. “I just wasn’t strong enough to do it.”

Jackson said Aunt Bee’s and Auntie Helen’s are the only formal laundry services she knows of for people with AIDS.

That’s hard to believe, really, considering the number of people with AIDS--more than 8,000 in Los Angeles County alone.

But as Jackson pointed out: “It’s one of those services that is so obvious that no one sees it.”

Until now, that is.