Milestones

This is the 100th post for LB and FFP's Austin Daily Photo. We aren't having a celebration, but I thought it would be good to show you the cake from our event on Wednesday night.

We were sponsors for a 'million dollar' party. In 1989 a friend of ours, Lew Aldridge, saw that in the fight against HIV and AIDS there was always an unmet need for emergency assistance. As the disease devastated individuals and families, many crises couldn't be assuaged with tightly-restricted dollars that came from governmental agencies. Lew thought that if he and his friends could raise some unrestricted funds, with no government rules, that the agency counseling victims in our community (AIDS Services Austin) would have a place to turn when people couldn't pay their rent or utilities or needed help with transportation or buying the increasingly expensive drugs needed in their fight. The funds could be set aside and a counselor could immediately draw the funds to make these peripheral problems go away. Lew's idea was that all his friends (and soon-to-be friends) would entertain their friends with dinners and theme parties, funding them out of their own pocket or getting sponsors, and then charge admission. The admission paid would go 100 percent to the fund (called the Paul Kirby fund after one of the first AIDS activists in our city). Basically Lew got a kitty going at many parties and dinners that would have been happening anyway. He organized a few annual special events and put in place a fun committee that people enjoyed being a part of. He called his brain child the Octopus Club because, I like to think, he knew it would send tentacles deep into the community. Amazingly the group survives and thrives and they threw a party to celebrate the millionth dollar flowing into the coffers. Since like all Octopus events, sponsors (corporate and individual) fully underwrote the food and drink (and the cake!) the gate from this event represented dollars that took the group to the one with six zeros. That's a real milestone. Amid tears for the losses in our community, there were tears of joy at all the friendships forged and the good done to help people in the community with the simplest crises with no strings attached.

Lew Aldridge is an iconic Austinite if there ever was one. He was a partner in a downtown restaurant, City Grill, for years and then helped developed a firm that primarily redevelops apartment complexes that have simple accommodations at affordable prices. (Alori Properties.) His firm systematically donates profits from the venture to organizations that serve the homeless, too.

It has to make us think, here at Austin Daily Photo, how we might be a force for good in our community. Try as we might, we'll never match Lew. But we can go along with some of his crazy good ideas.