Barbara Lawlor, Nederland. Remember the angst that was just below the surface of excitement as you prepared for your high school prom?

Who to go with?

What to wear?

How to pay for it?

Please don’t let me get a zit.

Maybe I’ll be king, or queen.

I can’t wait. I don’t know how to dance.

Proms are memory makers. Decades later one can laugh at the disasters, smile fondly at how young we were.

Mike Foster believes that adults can relive the prom even though they never even went the first time around. In fact, they can reinvent the prom they only imagined. He never attended a prom, but he heard many stories and believes that the event can become part of an adult’s social life: so, he has come up with The Most Excellent Adult Prom Ever.

After 25 years of living in the Nederland/Gilpin area and being part of the music scene, making the sound and lights happen, Mike is known as the person who makes things happen. He also owns and operates Hands of Time, an antique restoring business. “It’s a blast,” he says. “I refinish sculptures, rocking chairs, clocks and paintings.”

Last year Mike was thinking about Nederland as a Never-Neverland, a place for people who don’t want to grow up. It is a place where, if we need help, we get it; and if we do wrong, everyone knows it. He says he has been involved in the music scene for decades and has noticed that the older generation doesn’t get out to the bars, doesn’t go to the music festivals anymore.

“I wanted to come up with something for the local adults. I never went to a prom and I talked to a lot of people who also never went to a prom. Maybe we were all misfits who didn’t want to find a date, rent a tux. It was a big deal.”

Combining the past and the present, Mike decided that he would host a prom that didn’t involve cliques, that was just for fun, reliving the moment of the 50s to the 90s. Laughing with each other instead of at each other.

On May 19, at 8 p.m. at the Stage Stop Inn, Mike is beginning a summer-long step back in time. The first step is the prom itself, in which a yearbook will be made. It will include prom pictures, classic, cheesy poses, and local business team pictures. Attire will be hilarious.

Pre-prom activities will include dinner at Ned’s, a champagne buffet and then the dance at the Stage Stop. Local businessman, Blue Hessner, returns to his youth as the DJ playing music from the 80s and 90s with an electronic twist.

As per tradition, a king and queen will be chosen, and campaigning has already hit the social media. Included in the line-up are Dan Perez and Ashley Norton, Billy and Julia Lang, Jessica Schmelling, Andrew and Deb, Heather Taylor, Jenny Ousley and Logan Goodman.

There will be prizes for the best or worst attires and corsages, so creativity and craziness will go a long a way.

Mike says, “I am still 18 or 19 years old, emotionally, just a child at heart.”

The prom yearbook will come out at the end of the summer, at which point it will be available to those who attend the Sadie Hawkins Dance, the next step in reliving one’s past. In the spring, Mike will produce a mock graduation which he says comes from an event that happened 25 years ago.

“I was working at the Tungsten Grill and at the end of the tourist season, we all decided we deserved a graduation party for making it though the summer, so we had employees from all the local restaurants get together for a camping festival. We went into the national forest and hung out with the people we never had a chance to party with because we were all always working.”

It is time to do it again, says Mike, who will create mock diplomas with strange majors.

After talking it up for months, Mike now has a support group to help him make it happen and sponsors who are helping fund the whole event.

If you didn’t have a prom as a kid, you can have one now; if you attended the prom, but it was no good, now is your chance to get it right; and if you got it right the first time, do it even better now.

(Originally published in the May 10, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)