10,000 Turn Out for Posada Walk to Support AIDS Center

Old and young, gay and straight, an estimated 10,000 marchers thronged the streets of Pasadena’s Old Town district by candlelight Saturday night in the eighth annual Posada walk to raise money for the AIDS Service Center.

“We’re here because we have had people in our lives that have passed on and people we know that are struggling,” said Dorita Robinson, cradling a flickering red glass votive. “It’s a remembrance.”

The walkers moved in a thick, reverent line through Old Town, stopping here and there to hear singing groups.

Some chatted about the promising new breed of AIDS drugs, or the passing away of a loved one. Others told jokes and sang, and children danced around glimmering rows of candles lining the two-mile route that were lit in memorial.

Their voices dulled to a murmur, then a whisper as they entered the candle-lit hush of the First Congregational Church of Pasadena, and later St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, where singers belted out bright Spanish spirituals with tambourine and guitar.

And as the people massed again where they had begun, in front of Pasadena City Hall, they knelt on the sidewalk and covered it with chalked messages to loved ones whose lives were claimed by AIDS.

Organizers had said they hoped to raise more than $400,000 from this year’s Posada. But for those like David Willoughby, a Silver Lake HIV nurse/psychotherapist, the Posada also helps explain the pandemic’s toll on the human heart for those whose lives have not been shaken by AIDS.

“We’re doing this to show that those people we’ve lost will not be forgotten,” he said, standing over a chalked list of dead friends. He ended the list, “I LOVE YOU.”