Waiting For Groundhog Day

“I’ll give you a weather prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”

The alarm clock rings at 6 a.m. — the first uncanny echo of the movie “Groundhog Day” during my quest for Woodstock, Ill., where most of that movie was filmed.

Two and a half hours later, I stand on a rain-drenched platform, watching the train to Woodstock pull out of the station. I turn and lock eyes with the attendant behind the windowed ticket booth as he pulls down his metal shade, wiping himself from my view. The sound of key-turning-lock is unmistakable. As was the smirk on said attendant’s face: a textbook expression of Schadenfreude, if ever I’ve seen one.

As I walk away, it occurs to me that on a cloudy day I cast no shadow — a great prognostication for a groundhog, I suppose. But for me, the absence of a shadow just seems like a forecast for endless frustration and sodden misery.

“Don’t drive angry. Don’t drive angry.”

Plan B: Get over my phobia of driving in the rain on pockmarked two-lane country highways.

I’m driving along Route 47 under a cloudy sky that resembles wads of cotton steeped in dirty dishwater. Everything looks blurred around the edges: the red wooden barns and the metal silos; the empty fields and the low-rent strip malls; the 50s-style Dairy Mart and the “Got Mulch?” billboards. My windshield wipers, now set to “low,” swing like a pendulum lulling me into a light trance, and the road is starting to feel like a wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Only a scheduled interview 30 minutes from now prevents me from making an illegal U-turn on this two-lane highway and ending the pilgrimage — I’m a fan of the movie, but I do have my limits.

And then, I spot the green sign for Woodstock, population 20,200. A few turns later, the town square of Woodstock emerges from the mists like the fabled village of bloody freaking Brigadoon. The brick-paved streets surrounding the square feel like cobblestone under my tires: a signal that I have crossed the threshold into some other, vaguely surreal, quite possibly enchanted world. I notice the rain has stopped.

“There is something so familiar about this…”

Woodstock’s town square seems straight from the movies, as though the maw of some giant, cosmic crane had scooped it off the backlots of Hollywood and dropped it, unexpectedly, amid the rural heartlands of the Midwest. Change some signage, add a bit of Art Direction to the storefront window displays, park some period cars (or horses and carriages) on the streets and you’ve got a “picture ready” location for anything from an 1850s courtroom drama to a 2010 comedy set in some quirky New England town. The square strikes me as a place untethered from both space and time.

I expected the square to invoke the ghost of Bill Murray. But what I get instead is the spirit of Edward Hopper: Woodstock would have been the perfect place for Hopper to set up his easel. The closely packed brick facades of two- and at most three-story buildings, the scalloped awnings, the swan-like necks of the cast-iron lamp posts, the old-fashioned barber poles and red fire hydrants — they all seem like set pieces from one of Hopper’s iconic paintings of urban-rural America. The effect is heightened by the gloomy weather: On a cloudy and damp morning, the colors are lush and more saturated, the streets barren and imbued with a Hopper-esque sense of isolation.

It’s like being suspended inside of a bubble, holding your breath. Or peering into an unstirred snow globe, wanting to shake it into life.

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee… and a donut.”

Inside the Starbucks on the square, the spell is broken. The standardized Italianate décor of clean lines and warm coffee tones, the hiss and burble of espresso machines and conversation — I am back within the realm of the mundane and familiar, waiting for Rick Bellairs. He is a member of the Groundhog Days Committee, which organizes the annual multi-day festival celebrating Woodstock’s special role in both the movie and now the holiday.

As I wait, I survey the customers, who all seem to have me pegged as an out-of-towner. Yes, the sweatshirt fleece, and plaid shirts and sensible footwear are all both expected and well represented. But there’s also the beefy, middle-aged biker dude — chains and all — tapping into what looks like an iPhone. And the residents overall seem far less rural and heartlandish than expected, more Vermont than Illinois.

Bellairs, when he arrives, is no exception. He appears wary and cloaked with Yankee reserve. But only initially. It’s hard to maintain formality when you’re talking about a movie like “Groundhog Day.”

Bellairs was an extra in that 1993 movie shot almost 20 years ago. He then parlayed that experience into other background roles in movies such as “Sleepless in Seattle” (that’s the back of his balding head — his description, not mine — that you see at the drafting table next to Tom Hanks in one of the opening scenes of the movie). Bellairs also appeared in the movie “Hoffa.” “That was pretty much the end of my movie career,” Bellairs says. “Then I got a real job.” (Presumably in real estate, his current line of business.)

Bellairs joined the committee about six or seven years ago after winning the “People’s Choice” award at the festival’s Chili Cook-Off. Chili plays no part in the movie, but the cook-off is one of the Woodstockian touches that have been added to the annual celebration.

Over the years, some of the events inspired by the movie have been phased out. For example, the ice-carving demonstration: “The cost of ice got to be prohibitive,” Bellairs says.

Other events are added from time to time, and the festival is tweaked yearly. Two years ago, they added a Bachelor Auction to the Dinner/Dance held at the Moose Lodge, the same site where the dance-and-auction scene was filmed for the movie. Three bachelors are auctioned off each year. The first year, the highest bid was for Steve Gavers, a local resident and cancer survivor who raises tens of thousands of dollars each year for cancer research through a fundraising barn dance. At the auction last February, the star bachelor was Chris Elliot’s stand-in during filming, a McHenry resident who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actor, Bellairs says. But to date, no romances have bloomed from the auction.

Of course, Bill Murray groupie that I am, I have to ask Bellairs what he thought of Murray. “When he was walking to and from his trailer or his place for shooting, he would joke and smile and wave with people,” Bellairs says. “There was a hat that I wore in most of my scenes, and at the end of shooting he autographed that. He seemed quite the friendly guy.”

“It’s Groundhog Day… again.”

“Every Day is Groundhog Day in Woodstock, IL!” it says on the town’s Groundhog Days website. I ask Bellairs about this, whether Woodstock is mirroring the movie’s theme by, in essence, reliving the same day over and over again.

Bellairs chuckles when I ask this. “It’s kind of interesting that it’s a lot of local people [attending the festival],” he says. “In our crowds, you’ll get people who were extras in the movie and have, you know, lived it over and over again for the last 20 years.”

No one I asked could provide figures showing the movie’s effect on tourism in Woodstock. But common wisdom says it’s been good for business. “At the time, there were merchants around the square who were opposed to the filming because it closed the square to traffic, and [the film crew] took up a lot of the parking, and they blocked off streets, and [the merchants] thought that was hindering their business,” Bellairs says. “But man, twenty years later, people are still coming to Woodstock, and visiting the town because of the movie, and going to some of those very businesses.”

Committee member Mitch Olson estimates that overall about 1,000 people participated in various events at the 2010 Groundhog Days festival. Committee Co-Chair Pam Moorhouse says Woodstock gets visitors all year long from states including Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and even South Carolina.

Just don’t ask residents to ponder any deeper meanings contained in the movie. I made the mistake of using the word “existentialism” in an e-mail exchange with Olson, Ph.D. (mind you), who hosts the festival’s Movie Symposium. (This year’s topic was “The Top Ten Life Lessons from the Movie Groundhog Day.”) I never heard from Olson again.

I ask Bellairs what life lessons he drew from the movie. Response: nervous laughter. Then: “I’m not the one to get philosophical on the movie.”

“It’s so beautiful! Let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.”

I hop into Bellairs’ mini-van and he takes me on a tour of the town (which doesn’t take long).

More than one dozen plaques mark the most famous sites filmed in the movie, and most are clustered around the town square. One of the most popular sites is the spot where Murray steps into the shin-deep puddle. Like a little piece of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the plaque bears a footprint and the words “Bill Murray Stepped Here.” (Fittingly, some rainwater was puddled inside the footprint, which was definitely not made to scale — unless Murray is much, much smaller than he appears on screen.)

We drive along streets flanked with old Victorian homes lolling in the shade of elm-tree parasols, at times passing a bungalow here or a ranch-style home there. Bellairs is taking me to see the other sentimental favorite: the “Cherry Street Inn,” the fictional bed-and-breakfast where Murray’s character nearly spent an eternity. When we get there, it looks just as I remember it from the movie, white picket fence and all.

“It was a B&B in the movie, but at the time it was really just a single-family home,” Bellairs says. “And it’s now being converted to a B&B. So it’s, twenty years later, making the transition to what it was in the movie.”

The Wisconsin couple who bought the old Victorian two years ago is planning a grand opening for later this year — as the Royal Victorian Manor, not the “Cherry Street Inn.”

Bellairs is a fount of “Groundhog Day” trivia and anecdotes from the filming of the movie. He points out the portico addition to the Opera House (the “Pennsylvania Hotel” in the movie) and its fifth-story bell tower from which Murray’s character plunged to his (temporary) death. He shows me the street where his blue Saab appeared on screen, parked behind Murray’s character as he rescues a boy falling from a tree. He shows me the spot next to the brick-faced Greek-Revival-columned post office where a bronze groundhog statue was placed during filming, then tells me of Co-Chair Moorhouse’s mission to get just such a statue for Woodstock’s town square one day.

I think, but don’t say, that Woodstock would make a good retirement village for old movie extras. Listening to Bellairs, and experiencing the town through his memories, I half expect some Assistant Director to jump out from the shadows and yell, “Cut! Going again! Back to one!” The whole town seems steeped in (false) nostalgia: I find myself nostalgic for events I never experienced and people I never knew.

It’s easy to imagine old movie types being quite happy here, content to just ride out what remains of their slim share of eternity.

“It was the end of a very long day.”

My final stop, after leaving Bellairs and before heading home, is the Woodstock Square Mall, a modest collection of a few shops, a Middle Eastern vegetarian café and mostly business suites — it’s more office complex than mall. Located in the basement of that mall is Knuth’s Office Outfitters, where I find the still-beating heart of one true fan and his enduring love for the movie.

Tucked inside a recess next to the stairwell, just outside the entrance to Knuth’s, is a shrine of sorts dedicated to the movie. It’s the handiwork of Michael (“Palmy”) Palmquist, once a co-owner of Knuth’s and one of the founding members of Woodstock’s Groundhog Days festival. Palmy died in December 2009.

The shrine is a triptych of panels a few feet tall. One panel displays laminated stills taken during the filming of the movie. Another is composed from photos of Murray in baseball gear and newspaper clippings covering the charity softball game in which he played while in Woodstock. The third panel is a hodgepodge of memorabilia: a couple of 4×6 inch photos; three pink “Groundhog Bucks” that resemble Monopoly money; a filming notice released by Columbia Pictures; some photocopied articles about the movie; and a funny/wry fan letter to Murray penned by Palmy, paired with an unsigned fill-in-the-blanks response letter (“I’ve made it exceptionally easy to write me back,” Palmy wrote). If Murray ever sent a response to Palmy, it’s not posted on the panel.

Inside Knuth’s, one end-cap display is stocked with Groundhog Day souvenirs. Nothing much: just some T-shirts and tote bags, a few baseball caps and a small pennant, also a few magnets and three bottles of Woodstock Willie’s Groundhog Day Wakeup Sauce.

I buy two picture postcards and chat a bit with the cashier, ask about the movie’s fans who pass through town. I don’t mention Palmy; I don’t want to dredge up any sadness. My gut tells me: This is not the place for nosy journalistic intrusiveness.

Postcards in hand, I decide it’s time to go home. I’m still not sure just what I was searching for, or what compelled me to make this quest to Woodstock. But somehow, I feel I’ve found it.

“This is Ned Ryerson, my new insurance agent.”

Waiting for me, when I get home, is an e-mail from Stephen Tobolowsky, the actor who played Ned Ryerson in the movie. Four days have passed since I contacted him, so his response is a small, unexpected boost.

If anyone understands and fully appreciates the enduring power of the movie, it’s Tobolowsky, who still participates in Groundhog Day celebrations, both in Woodstock and most recently in Punxsutawney, Pa., where the movie is purportedly set. He can tell you, the power of “Groundhog Day” extends to many unexpected corners of the world:

“I went the wrong way through the security checkpoint in Iceland, and all the alarms went off,” Tobolowsky recently told the Epoch Times. “The Icelandic police came out with guns, their hands on their holsters. They came out, and one of the head policemen comes up to me and goes, ‘Put them away. It’s Ned.’”

“Groundhog Day was a special film,” Tobolowsky says in his e-mail. “It has the power to make people laugh and to make their lives better. It has generosity of spirit and true wisdom.”

And what of eternity? “I would spend eternity the same way I am spending my life,” Tobolowsky says. “I would write, act, play the piano, and watch Celebrity Rehab with my wife.”

“It’s still just once a year, isn’t it?”

In June, the Groundhog Days Committee will begin planning the events for next year’s festival — eight months to go before Woodstock Willie’s next prognostication. In the meantime, Woodstock will host many other events, including the Mozart Festival, the Fair Diddley Craft Show, and a Victorian Christmas celebration that begins each Thanksgiving weekend. There’s more to life in Woodstock than the Groundhog Days.

Still, I prefer to imagine Woodstock as an enchanted place that slumbers, awakening just once a year to welcome the fans who join them in the square. The sense of Woodstock-as-Brigadoon is just too hard to shake.