Come Dream with Me Brings Crowd to Civic Center for Celebration

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Friday night at the Anderson County Civic Center came alive, giving birth to fond memories, as “The Come Dream With Me” prom returned with a circus theme — “Under the Big Top” – and filled the building with more than 138 special-needs friends from Anderson County and surrounding communities, along with the people who showed up to make the celbration work.

Kathy Schofield, the co-director of the Anderson Area Special Olympics, said the event had become a ritual of anticipation.

“The countdown starts every year,” Schofield said, “and by the first of the year participants are already watching the Come Dream with Me prom Facebook page for the announcement of the next theme and the opening of registration.” The goal, she said, is both simple enough and a challenge: to “capture everybody,” to keep the event growing, and to carry forward the legacy left by Sherry Fuller, whose shoes, she said, were “really big” to fill.

This year’s prom had the unmistakable pageantry of a carnival married to a school dance. There were magicians, face painters, cotton-candy makers, balloon artists, donated dinner, live music from Van Silver, and dance music between the band’s sets. Guests could dress up or dress down, but they were given the full grammar of prom either way: corsages, boutonnieres, dinner, music, the social permission to feel briefly and wholly celebrated.

The event was woven together by a web of volunteers and donors that seemed to include nearly every civic nerve in the county. Anderson County provided the facilities and, in Schofield’s words, let the organizers “come in here and take over the Civic Center” with whatever they needed.

Schofield also pointed to the labor of students and teachers from across Anderson County, including beta clubs and student-government groups, as well as community members who simply showed up to help. That kind of scaffolding matters because the prom is not merely an entertainment program; it is a civic collaboration in which the county’s institutions briefly become a single organism with one job: make the night feel effortless.

Matthew Hilley, the founder and president of Honor for Heroes, said his organization became involved after the event’s revival three years ago, after the pandemic interrupted it. At first, he said, the group stepped in almost by accident, helping get food to participants at the last minute. After that first post-COVID prom, he said, they decided they wanted to stay involved every year, both to ensure that the event continued and to help run it properly.

Hilley said the connection to Honor for Heroes was natural because the organization aims to recognize, support, and memorialize heroes, and he sees the special-needs community as part of that circle. He included not only the Special Olympics athletes and other participants, but also their parents and the volunteers who work behind the scenes, all of whom, he said, are heroes in their own right. The parents, he added, are “always so thankful and so appreciative,” because the prom offers something many of the participants otherwise do not get: a prom of their own.

The emotional register of the event seemed to rest on a simple but durable idea: that joy is not a luxury item, and that a prom can be more than a ritual of adolescence. Hilley said the smiles coming in through the door, met by a red carpet lined by cheering volunteers, made that clear, and that the evening carried a visible sense of relief and delight. For some of the guests, this was their one chance each year to experience the thing other teenagers take for granted.

Greg Elgin, the Anderson County Council member from District 3, said he tries to volunteer every year. He described the county’s role as providing the space, while the caterer provides a sit-down meal so the evening can feel like “a real prom,” with the kind of dinner and ceremony that lets the guests have “kind of what everybody else has” and, for a few hours, “try to be normal for the night.

S.C. Representative Don Chapman, R-Dist. 8, also praised Schofield and Special Olympics for their work with special-needs families, saying he has tried to continue the tradition of support in Anderson. His presence, like that of the county councilman, underscored how the event has become a kind of civic pilgrimage for local officeholders — not because it is politically useful, necessarily, but because it presents a version of public life in which the right answer is obvious and the work is visible.

What happened Friday night was not a spectacle in the usual sense; it was something steadier. It was the county at its best, which is to say not ambitious, exactly, but generous, practical, and willing to dress the thing up with magicians and cotton candy so that the people at its center could have, for one evening, the formality and glamour of being fully seen.