Rotary Hosts 1980s Prom

The Rotary Club of Hoboken does two things well: help the community and throw awesome parties. They threw a hot one Saturday night at the Elks Lodge, a full-fledged 1980's themed prom party.

About Town loves the Rotary, and we love to party, so of course we went. As for the 80s, we consider it to be the best decade of all the ones between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Nearly everyone attended in period costume. Most found theirs at . About Town didn't have time to shop there, so we settled for rocking the casbah in a Clash shirt and speaking with Yakov Smirnoff's accent.

People who attend 80's parties always wear variations of the same outfits. Guys either dress like they're in a new wave band, a heavy metal band or the Beastie Boys. Girls are always somewhere on the Molly Ringwald-Madonna spectrum. Just once we want to see a woman channel Claire Huxtable or Maggie Seaver or some other 80's television mom. If you really love the 80's, next time show up in clunky jewelry, a turtleneck sweater, skirt hem hitting the floor, thick heeled boots and hair curled in a perm.

About Town's pick for best costume goes to hMag Magazine publisher Kevin Cale, who stiffened eight inches of hair Flock of Seagulls style into a slope that shot off the left side of his head. Cale said the stiffening took 45 minutes and a full bottle of Aqua Net.

“I'm going to have to wash my hair for an hour and a half later,” he joked.

About Town also wants to award an honorable mention to Andrew Brown from the JDA Development Group, who wore a simple orange polo shirt with the collar popped. He went prep. Excellent. We were not expecting to see the Robert Chambers look.

We also saw Assemblyman Ruben Ramos, Freeholder Anthony “Stick” Romano and Hoboken Chamber of Commerce president Mike Novak. They weren't dressed up, but they seemed to be having a good time. Somebody needs to throw a 50's party so that Stick can show up in a black leather jacket and fulfill his destiny as the Fonzie of Hoboken.

The party featured a black prom style photo backdrop and silver balloons, with catering from and music from two professional DJs who spun the sounds of the 80's through their brand new 21st century Apple laptops. The DJ's played all the 80's hits, including the Pretty in Pink theme, the Breakfast Club theme, and that Tom Petty song with the trippy Alice in Wonderland video that terrified a young About Town back in '85.

People got really drunk too, with two kegs and a bar full of liquor. Rotarians pounded Wild Turkey all night long. In all the excitement About Town stained a table cloth with wine as a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev. Then we dropped a wicked Dukakis in the Elks toilet.

Everyone had a great time, and surely the Rotary will put the money raised in ticket sales to good use. According to president Rich Marsh, who was wearing a tee-shirt of a tuxedo shirt under his white suit jacket, the club hasn't decided yet what it will do. In March the Rotary donated its proceeds as planned to the Hoboken University Medical Center, and on the fly that night they also contributed to a Hoboken firefighter who had just lost his home in a fire.

That's the sort of thing the Rotary does, if you didn't know already. About Town worries that people have only this vague idea that the group is just a bunch of old guys getting together to smoke cigars and talk about soil erosion.

Far from it. The Hoboken Rotary ain't your daddy's Rotary. It's comprised of professionals, split among male and female, mostly under age 40, who have maintained whatever youthful inspiration they had as say, college students, to get involved with the community.

Anyone interested in doing that, and who wants to have a good time in the process, should contact the Rotary. They're always looking for new members.

Because in a few years, they're going to need someone to throw the 90's prom.

Alan Skontra was a big dork who never went anywhere. Then he started writing the About Town column for Patch, and now he's everywhere. Have a hot tip on an event in Hoboken? Send an invitation, questions and comments too, to alanskontra@hotmail.com. And if he gets enough followers he might actually post his first tweet @ twitter.com/alanskontra.