San Francisco Chronicle; Friday, December 12, 1997 - Page C1
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer

"When you're speaking about AIDS and you have a crown on your head, people just don't take you seriously," said Kate Shindle, 20, who is in town today to honor the 10th anniversary of the Names Project and the launch of the Online Quilt, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

She'll meet the public and make direct eye contact with anyone who stands six feet. Those shorter will meet the small crown pin she wears just above a pin of a spool of thread, symbolic of the quilt.

"People think you put on a dress, look pretty, walk around in a swimsuit and cut ribbons all year," she said yesterday over lunch at the Fly Trap. "I don't agree with that image. I'm just a college kid with a really high-profile job."

AIDS awareness and prevention is her official platform, but it is not an issue she acquired because she needed a cause to wrap around her beauty and talent.

She came to the East Bay last spring and slept on the floor of a Piedmont church while working for a week as a volunteer in hospices. She cleaned, hauled boxes, scraped and painted with a group of fellow students at Northwestern University, where she was a junior last year.

A three-time loser for Miss Chicago, she had just been named Miss Lake-Cook (for Lake and Cook counties), a suburban satellite contest. She didn't tell anybody about that and wasn't thinking Miss America or even Miss Illinois. She had an uncle with HIV and had heard about the quilt and wanted to see it. To do so, she didn't mind showering at a health club down the street from the Piedmont church, and she didn't mind hard labor. Back at Northwestern, she worked three mornings a week as a janitor at a dance studio in exchange for lessons she couldn't afford.

"I really wanted to work with the Names Project," said Shindle, who grew up in Moorestown, N.J. "I think it's really satisfy ing getting my hands dirty for something I care about."

She's also willing to keep them clean, if unmanicured, for something she cares about. That's why she went after Miss Illinois and Miss America. To prep for it, she studied the AIDS epidemic as if it were a final exam. Onstage she mentioned the quilt, so it is symbolic that she is here for tonight's event.

It is her third visit to California. She came a few years ago when Northwestern was in the Rose Bowl. The main thing she remembers about that trip was the favorable air fare -- $289 round-trip.

Now she flies first class. Wednesday night she flew two connectors from South Carolina, and yesterday morning she was on the go at 6:45.

By midmorning she'd already done a TV appearance and visited a high school when she arrived at Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, in San Francisco's Bayview district. She stood before two giant quilt panels while speaking to junior high school students.

"Now, more than ever, it is coming after young people like us," she told the assembly. "Every hour of every day two American teenagers get HIV."

A student asked why she wanted to be Miss America, and the answer was easy. "So I could speak out on a national level about HIV and AIDS," she said. "I wanted to be Miss America so I could speak out about AIDS all year."

The audience is not always receptive. "There are a lot of people who don't think Miss America should be talking about condoms and sex," Shindle said.

Her first engagement was at Le high University in Pennsylvania. She planned a safe-sex speech for a college audience, then arrived to find that a professor had brought his daughter's Girl Scout troop.

The next day the local paper announced "Miss America Teaches Girl Scouts How to Put Condoms On." For the record, she hadn't.

"I know this sounds like something a beauty pageant girl would say, but I would have been happy if any of the other girls got the job."

Shindle travels 20,000 miles a month and visits four cities a week. She lives in hotels, can pack in her sleep. "Clothes, crown, hair dryer, roller and zip it up."

She rides around in a rental car with "Thrifty" on the side. When she goes into a restaurant, she throws the crown in the trunk. It's no big deal to her, though it certainly is for her audience. Publicist David Perry got to hold it for a picture yesterday.

"Every gay man's dream," he said.

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QUILT ONLINE

THE NAMES PROJECT FOUNDATION'S ONLINE QUILT will be launched from 8 to 11 tonight at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. Admission is $10. Call (415) 978-ARTS. Or www.aidsquilt.org.
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