AIDS Lawyer Helps Dispel the Nightmare By Jeff Gammage Inquirer Staff Writer Everybody who comes to work for the AIDS Law Project hears this warning: One night, you're going to lay your head on the pillow and have "the dream." The dream is both simple and terrifying: You have AIDS. Or someone you love has it. Some people have the dream, reconsider the emotional cost of their job, and move on. Ronda Goldfein had the dream. She stayed. "It's almost kind of what drives you," says Goldfein, executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. "Because you know it's really bad, and you have to do what you can to help." Goldfein is 46, her face defined by luminous green eyes, pale orange freckles, and a toothy Bobby Kennedy smile. She's crazy about Dee Dee Ramone. Hates sun-dried tomatoes. Loves the Miss America pageant. "It appeals to the part of me that wants to critique other ladies' dresses," she says, laughing. The first cases she handled at the law project, she worked for free. Eventually she was hired as a staff attorney. Four years ago she was named director, leading the nation's only independent, nonprofit center that provides free legal services to people with HIV and AIDS. "It's a really difficult job," Goldfein says, sitting in the nonsmoking room of a Walnut Street coffeehouse. "People get sick. You get close to them. They die." As the nature of AIDS has changed, so have the legal challenges. When AIDS was largely confined to gay men, no one worried about leaving an orderly estate for the children. Today, infections are up dramatically among women, and many of those women have children. Where once people with AIDS got sicker and sicker until they died, now they may get sick and well in a continuing cycle, incurring huge debt while unable to work, needing legal help with creditors when they're better. Today, some of the very drugs that are keeping people alive are generating weird side effects - and new litigation. Goldfein was born in Wilmington, where her parents ran a beauty salon. The family moved to Miami Beach when she was 12, and by her teens she was deep into the local punk-rock scene, attracted by the music's rebellion and righteousness. "She was always kind of glamorous," says Jennifer Bates, who has known Goldfein since they were devotees of a band called Screamin' Sneakers. "She always had these guys following in her wake." Goldfein graduated from Nova Southeastern University law school in 1983, left Florida for a job with a New York firm, then helped her lawyer brother open an office in Wilmington. She found the town quieter than her temperament, and moved to Philadelphia. By 1992 she was tired of representing insurance companies in asbestos cases. At the same time, two close friends were diagnosed with HIV, one after being raped. "Clearly," Goldfein says, "this was a big message from fate." On a recent Friday evening, she and the law project hosted a '60s-style fund-raiser at MBC, a marketing firm on Rittenhouse Square. Old cardboard album covers, Easy Rider and Woodstock, lined a countertop, while on the sound system The Who was t-t-talkin' 'bout their g-g-generation. For $20, law-project supporters got beer and finger sandwiches - sorry, no hash brownies, and definitely no free love. Many of the people there, some adorned in rainbow tie-dye and swirling paisley, had been battered by HIV. Kim Silverman knows. AIDS killed her brother. Before he died he fought a highly publicized legal battle, one led by Goldfein. "I'll do anything for her," Silverman says, taking a moment from arranging trays of fruit. "They gave my brother back his dignity." In 1994, Irving Silverman sued the 12th Street Gym for AIDS discrimination, saying the owner had humiliated him, demanding he get a doctor's note and then tossing him out after he cut his finger. The gym disputed that, noting that half its clientele is gay. Silverman died of AIDS four months after filing the suit. Two months after that, the gym agreed to pay a $35,000 settlement to his estate. Ninety percent of the 2,200 people who call the law project each year have already been diagnosed. Sixty percent are men and nearly half are African American, though the clients' profiles can be as varied as the problems they face. Goldfein is eager to fight their fights. She harbors no private longing for another path, no secret ambition to be an astronaut or a park ranger, preferring to take what the job brings her - encouragement, disappointment, hope, loss. "When I talk about this, I feel like I sound like this giant martyr. And I'm not," Goldfein says. "This job gives you an opportunity to make a difference in someone's life. Not everyone gets that opportunity."   Contact staff writer Jeff Gammage at 215-854-2810 or jgammage@phillynews.com