Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults

These women want to transport you back to a time of glitter and glue and everything nice.

(Photo courtesy of Michelle Joni Lapidos.)

Michelle Joni Lapidos is the girl who would not grow up.

At least, not in the conventional sense of being bogged down by anxiety and an unloved job. Pretty, with red hair and an incessant desire to play, Lapidos is a part-hippie, part-four-year-old devoted to seeing adults break out of their routines and rediscover the "magic" of childhood.

It is one of the reasons that Lapidos, 30, is starting a preschool. For adults. That's right. Anyone 18 or older can enroll in Lapidos's Preschool Mastermind, a month-long course where adults can relive their pre-K days with activities like finger-painting, show-and-tell, nap time, and even a class picture day that prompts you to "dress your 4-year-old best."

Lapidos, who in 2013 started a skipping club in Brooklyn, says she's always looking for new ways to get people in touch with the freedom of childhood. She was encouraged by a friend to start a mastermind course, and later — while giving a foot massage to another acquaintance who happened to teach preschool — divined just what kind of project to tackle.

"His preschool-teacher-ness came through me," says Lapidos of her eureka moment. What she characterizes as her impulsive self proceeded to bring the concept to fruition, at which point she invited a blogger friend, Candice Kilpatrick, to be her teaching assistant.

"Adults are in this routine, this stagnation, and by tapping into the 'play' part of our brains by skipping or doing the things that we did in preschool, we're bringing ourselves back to another place, another time with ourselves, maybe when we were more believing of ourselves, when we were more confident and ready to take on the world. And I want to nourish that in people," Lapidos says.

(Read the full article on the Village Voice)