Groundhog Day

The following is a somewhat fictitious account of my trip to Woodstock. Somewhat. I promised people tales of a hellacious trip, but truth is, the truth is more pleasant. Also more boring.

Traveling to Woodstock is a lot like traveling back in time: to 1992, when they filmed that damned movie. The town sentinels of touristic attractiveness have made sure that everything that can possibly remain the same has remained the same, and laminated pieces of cardboard mark all the truly historic markers: Where Bill Murray stepped in the puddle; Where Bill Murray leapt to his spurious demise; Where Bill Murray took a drink.

The last time we'd been there, we'd only seen the groundhog chomp on the mayor's arm. I was all for a repeat of that particular event. I'm not a sadistic voyeur, but I can play that role, and at 6 a.m. I was nudging Kim awake. "He's going to maybe take out a vein this year, I can feel it!" I whined. "And we're going to miss it!"

Kim muttered something in sleeptalk. I translated it to Fuck off. So I picked up my copy of Dostoyevsky, consoling myself with ruminating over the few pages where Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker with an axe. A groundhog attack it ain't, but it got me through the morning.

Truth be told, I was a little woozy myself. We'd hit the banquet hall the night before, where $15 bought you a buffet dinner and dancing package. The dinner was fine--I settled mostly on spaghetti with meatballs, bringing me once again back to my college days--but the band was playing mostly ephemereal covers of Jimmy Buffet, CCR and the like. A dancer I ain't, and this kind of music wasn't giving me a good chance to fake it, either. I turned to my date with my most winning smile on my face. "I think I'm going to be sick," I said gravely. "Must be the low-grade pasta."

"Oh, sure." She looked like she'd just tasted rancid milk. "It's okay. You don't have to dance."

Well, that was a relief.

"I mean, with this kind of music, it takes skill. Poise. Grace. And endurance."

She carefully enunciated the word endurance, leaving all kinds of double entendres, none of which made me out to be the Dirk Diggler of the Midwestern Suburbs.

"See, these guys dancing?" She pointed to the crowd. I won't go into the ladies, but the men were all, almost without exception, gray-haired, bespectacled, balding, wrinkled, and unwearying, as they twirled, tossed and dosie-doed their partners all over the thirty square feet of ballroom floor Bill Murray had Played Piano For in the 1992 Film Groundhog Day. (Another paper plaque reminded the crowd of this historic significance, lest we should forget and think we were merely in some community center eating Ragu-saturated spaghetti.)

"These guys could dance all night," she was saying, "and come back in the morning for more. I wouldn't expect that of you. I know better."

Confronted with such a crass diatribe against my own plethora of shortcomings, I took refuge the way all strong men of the new millenium do: I went to the bar.

In this case, the bar was more of a water fountain cum sideboard, with a bored-looking woman standing idly. "Give me a Grey Goose martini, straight," I growled hoarsely.

She only stared belligerently. "We got Coors, and we got Coors on draft," she said tonelessly.

"What else do you have on draft?"

In response, she plunked down a plastic cup of something that looked remotely like beer. "That's a buck fawty."

I managed to sink down three or four of them in rapid succession. Blech. It tasted like warm sweat sock.

Having insulated my sense of manhood against further injury, I returned to our table, where I expected to find Kim looking hangdog, suffering those fifteen minutes or so acutely aware of how miserable her existence would be without me. Instead, I found a local chatting her up. "This is Jim-Bob," she chirped happily as I took my seat. "He owns two franchises in this county alone!"

Jim-Bob looked at me suspiciously. "This the feller you were talking about?" he drawled. "Looks right like a gust of wind would blow him away."

Jim-Bob, on the other hand, was sporting an impressive beer gut for a mid-twenties youth. "I do cardio," I said, trying not to sound apologetic.

"Hey, a right smart of you people do that, don't you? Saw some on TV at that Rainbow Parade."

"I'm not gay."

"I...believe you." He turned his attention back to Kim. "You know how to do the two-step, beautiful?"

It turned out that she did. She cut a lovely figure on the floor, being the youngest, the most beautiful, and the one in most possession of her own teeth. Jim-Bob, on the other hand, plodded like a dinosaur with hemmhroids, interrupting his counting to leer and stare at her breasts.

Coors, it turns out, is better when guzzled. Alone.

So the next morning was turning out to be more grueling than I'd believed. Domestic beer has its own flavor of aftereffect. Your body is irritated at you not just because of the alcohol saturating your system, but more out of outrage that you didn't find something better than, after the Coors ran out, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

At ten to seven, Kim woke up. "Shit!" she gasped. "We're going to miss the groundhog!"

"Well, I--"

"Why didn't you wake me, numbnuts? You have to read that damned book now?"

I put Dostoyevsky down, smothering thoughts of the axe dutifully. "Maybe they're running late," I said sheepishly.

"Maybe you want to get your do-nothing ass in the car and warm it up." She started looking around for her shoes, which were actually still on her feet. "I could be with Joe-Bob, you know. He has a franchise. Makes a lot of money. And he's got endurance."

On the last, I certainly gave him credit. My irritation for him would endure just about anything now.

Twenty minutes later, we were standing in a foot of snow. The groundhog, looking fairly placid, was out, having already made his prediction: Six more weeks of winter, a plague falling among them, more bad publicity for Britney Spears, and a winning Lotto number of 23-14-7. People were milling about, getting their picture taken with the groundhog and his handler, a ponytailed young man who looked as enthusiastic as that morning's dose of lithium allowed him.

Kim snapped pictures of the groundhog. "Let's adopt him," she suggested. "He looks cute."

"The picture alone will last you a lifetime," I intoned.

The rest of the day was spent in the jailhouse bar, throwing back Blue Moons and watching Groundhog Day (which was filmed in Woodstock, by the way, in case you didn't know) and shooting the breeze with a vet colleague who lives in the area. On our way past city limits, we went by a sign hung askew on a rickety house wall: "Joe-Bob's Snow Shoveling Service." Nary a snow plough in sight. A rack of snow shovels was up on the wall. And in front of the driveway, shoveling like mad, red in the face with a battered Lucky cigarette hanging from his lip, Joe-Bob.

"No wonder he's got such endurance!" I gasped. "Quite the entrepreneur."

"Oh, shut up."

I would have tipped Joe-Bob a toot from the horn and an extended finger of choice. But the shovel looked made of metal, and I could tell he had quite the throwing arm.