Daniel Rubin: For them, Dining Out for Life is personal

When Terry and Michael McNally, owners of London Grill, decided to participate in Dining Out for Life that first year, 1991, the cause was personal.

They'd met while working at the 20th Street Cafe, a tiny, tony remnant of the restaurant renaissance, where many of the staffers were gay.

"From that small restaurant alone," Terry recalls, "we buried eight to 10 people by the mid-'80s."

To the McNallys, giving a third of the night's proceeds to AIDS research meant trying to save the life of someone you loved.

London Grill has taken part in the event every year since, and tonight will be joined by 300 other restaurants around Philadelphia in the benefit for ActionAIDS. From its humble Philadelphia origins (the first year, it raised $20,000), the event has spread to 53 cities across the United States and Canada, and last year alone raised $4 million.

Yet Terry McNally worries that the cause has, as she puts it, lost steam.

"I think pink is the new red," she said yesterday with a sigh. All the attention goes to "breast health awareness. People seem to think AIDS is cured."

In 1991, when Julie Drizin, a WXPN-FM newswoman, conceived the event, AIDS was seen as a plague - mysterious, frightening, deadly.

She had volunteered as a buddy for ActionAIDS, joining a network of supporters - many from the gay and lesbian communities - who rallied around people infected with HIV.

Her first assignment was to support a young African American man. She saw him once in the hospital.

"The next time I went to visit him, the bed was empty," Drizin said. Her second buddy was a Latino man who lived in North Philly. He, too, disappeared. "I think he was a recovering drug addict," she said.

By her third case - a 4-year-old boy from Strawberry Mansion whose parents had been addicts - Drizin knew she needed to do something bigger than one-on-one.

Drizin, now a public radio producer in the Washington suburbs, thought up Dining Out for Life as a simple way for the region to support AIDS research.

"I think we all needed something to celebrate," she said. "What better way to celebrate life but to eat?"

Peter Eobbi will be an ambassador, thanking people at London Grill tonight. He's been celebrating life since 1983, when he learned he had the virus.

His friends and family and partner worried that his diagnosis was a death sentence.

"They were freaking out, but that's not my mental makeup," said Eobbi, 65, and a designer from Fishtown. He stopped drinking and doing drugs - "all the kinds of stuff that would put me at risk." He got tested regularly. He learned all about his T-cell levels. He consumed herbs, practiced meditation and yoga, and did his best to triumph over the disease. He also was lucky.

Not until 1995 did he become sick from HIV, and soon after he recovered from his pneumonia, he started taking a new regimen - protease inhibitors - which have managed his illness effectively.

"One of the things that really helps is having a good support system - my ex-wife, my kids, my partner. They've all been really supportive. Unfortunately, that's one of the problems with the new demographics of people being diagnosed."

There's still a stigma, he explained, in the African American community that stifles talk of AIDS. Another group he worries about is older men and women contracting the virus after coming out of long relationships. "The women have been through menopause. They feel they don't need protection. They could have been sleeping with anybody."

Eobbi, an ActionAIDS board member, has another worry: Medical advances have made people less afraid of contracting the virus.

"One of the things we've been talking about is the parties that young gay men are having where they want to get infected so they are part of the in thing. They figure they're not going to get sick. They can just take a pill.

"It's really sick."