Bad. Scared.

Those two words seemed out of place when Teddy Atlas uttered them last night prior to the annual Teddy Dinner at the Hilton Garden Inn in Bloomfield.

After all, the 8-year-old fund-raiser for the Atlas Foundation, which Teddy put together as a memorial to his later father, Dr. Theodore Atlas, had drawn its usual SRO crowd and a long list of celebrities who came, he said, “because, like the people of Staten Island, they believe in what we do.”

So, what could be bad”

“What’s bad,” Atlas said, “is after eight years, you see how much more needs to be done.

“We need every cent we get here tonight. Half of its gone already.

“People’s emergency needs are there all the time. We serve as many as we’re aware of and the number keeps growing all the time.”

Later, at the dais, Atlas would describe some to a crowd of approximately 1,000 which occasionally had been called to order, perhaps because Atlas had an impossible act to follow.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Timmy Kelly, a frail, blind 11-year-old from Philadelphia, began the evening by singing “God Bless America.”

And, after his father, Tim, told the crowd of an Atlas Foundation check for Timmy’s college education fund – “A very generous check from a man who never met Timmy,” his dad said – Timmy dedicated “Danny Boy” to Atlas.

“Timmy was born prematurely,” the father said later. “One pound, 15 ounces. He had about 20 surgeries and during the surgeries, he lost his sight, when he was 4 months old.”

In what he called a report to the stockholders, Atlas ticked off some instances of helping peopled deal with more immediate problems: A wheelchair, aiding a family after its house burned down, cancer medication, a refrigerator, making it possible for a father to see his sick son in the hospital every day.”

Later, the foundation announced the donation of a $6,000 machine – to help assist with the rehabilitation of paralysis patient and Annadale resident Jimmy Brown. Atlas then appealed to the crowd to contribute $39.000 to pay for a specially-equipped van for Brown, as former standout second baseman for Tottenville High School and South Shore Little League.

In less than five minutes, $40,000 was raised.

After the “stockholders” were gone, Atlas got to “scared.”

“If you don’t try to grow,” he said, “you stagnate, and then you go the other way. We don’t want – we can’t have this be a one-dinner-a-year operation.”

Indeed, it hasn’t been for the Atlas Foundation family, many of whom have been there from the very beginning: Neil Murphy, Steven Zawada, Tom Conway, Kathy Zito, Joe Fama, Councilman Mike McMahon, Paul Quattrochi and Ken Mitchell, just to name a few.

People’s needs are year-round, and so are their efforts on the part of the foundation and the needy in this community.

Atlas sees the need to do more.

“I’d like to see us purchase a house. Nothing fancy,” he said. “W could fix it up ourselves, and then staff it and bring in five-six-seven abused kids and give them parenting and counseling.

“If it worked out, we could expand the program and eventually have one in each borough.”

That’s not about to happen off the proceeds from the Teddy Dinner.

“We need to reach out to other areas and get help from other places,” Atlas said. “We need a foundation or a corporation, or both, to adopt us. We need to write up some grant proposals. Or maybe even get the city or the state involved.

“The fundamentals – the building blocks – are in place to take things a little further. Now we have to ensure the future and make certain we’re able to stay with people’s needs.”