At 6:00 this morning, I set out for Woodstock Square by foot. The clerk at the Best Western called a cab for me, but there was no answer. It’s four degrees outside, and windy, so when I see a building labeled police department, I walk in to ask for a ride. After some questioning, my request is granted, and I find myself in a police cruiser with Officer David. There were no cabs, I tell him apologetically. “Oh, there’s one guy,” he says. “But, you know, he’s been busy with the storm and the Super Bowl and all.” He grants my request to sit in the front seat and drops me at the square, just in front of Starbucks.
In Starbucks, I run into Rick Bellairs, the organizer of the Groundhog Days festival. I ask him if he expects a large turnout. “No,” he says, laughing. He suspects the weather will keep people away. Bellairs invites me next door, to the Stage Left Cafe, where the polka band and committee members are warming up. It’s here that I get a different sense of the event. Before it was Groundhog Days, the multi-day celebration, it was an annual breakfast, just an opportunity for local participants to gather and tell stories about their days working on the film. The mood at Stage Left is convivial, neither totally earnest nor ironic. Here in the Midwest, inclement weather means one might go weeks without seeing friends—this time of year, I can go weeks without seeing my next-door neighbor—and Groundhog Days is, to locals, something to do in February.
After the prognostication, we adjourn to the Moose Lodge for the annual Groundhog Breakfast. The polka band plays. Groundhog Day is running, muted, on the televisions in the corners of the rooms. I am finally eating a real meal. Bob Hudgins, the location manager, who came in from Austin, gets up to speak. He’s been coming to the fest for more than a decade, but looks humbled and happy, standing before a packed room. This town’s got a bit magic, he says. “The fact that we are here, and it’s all because of a silly movie. Harold Ramis made a good one.”
On Friday night, at the annual Groundhog Dinner and Dance at the Moose Lodge in Woodstock, Ill., Theresa from Sun Prairie, Wis., approaches my table after noticing my recorder and notebook. Visiting the town where her favorite movie, Groundhog Day, was filmed, she tells me, was on her bucket list, and she was surprised to learn she wouldn’t need to travel all the way to Punxsutawney to cross it off. She and her husband drove down earlier in the afternoon, and are staying through the weekend.
She becomes flustered when I pick up my recorder. “Am I going to be on TV?” she asks. She declines to state her last name with a wave of her hands, declaring she is not important enough to be interviewed. But she does have some advice for me.
“Here’s what you can say in your story: Hey, campers! You don’t need to go all the way to Punxsutawney. You can come right here to Woodstock, where Bill Murray made the film and it’s so special.”
Theresa’s response is far from unusual here at Groundhog Days, a five-day celebration of the filming of the 1993 movie in Woodstock, 50 miles northwest of Chicago. The attendees can be divided into two camps, each as enthusiastic as the other: the tourists, who are rapturous about the film, and the locals, who are rapturous about their town.
by Jennifer Rice Epstein, TMN | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Rice Epstein for The Morning News
[ed. This gives me a chance to repost one of my favorite Groundhog Day movie essays: Love and Death (DS).]
