When Your Town Becomes a TV Set

My local diner. (c)PipPepPop

Sometimes I'm sitting on the couch watching TV and you vaguely think, "Hmm, that  location in a TV show looks familiar..."
Is it deja vu? Is it a rerun? Or more than likely, I've been to this spot IRL. TV shows such as

• Blindspot
• Quantico,
• YOU
• The Sinner
• Billions
•  Forever
•  Law and Order
•  The Blacklist
•  The Good Wife
•  Girls
• Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and even ED (that was back in 2000, but it was the first show) have used my quaint NYC-adjacent suburb for location shoots.

 For the particular location on the left, a 2018  NBC Superbowl preview blew my mind. Not only was the plot of the show familiar (if you've seen Glee), but the locations or Rise were eerily close to home. Literally, they were a five to 10 minute drive from my house. There have been several times over the last few years when I would see the police roping off  my local coffee shop with cameras in the middle of the night or on afternoons after they close. Rise used locations including our local coffee shop, Sparkys.  the power plant, the old village downtown by my mechanic, the old dye factory that now houses a brewery and artist space. Rise is the story of a frustrated English teacher (Josh Radnor) that convinces the popular school quarterback, Robbie, to join the school musical.  This production of Spring Awakening rubs the downtrodden mining community the wrong way.  This town is not as free-wheeling as Beverly Hills in the NEW 90210. It sends shock waves through the athletic community and shakes up the theatre club, run by the touchy Ms. Wolfe (Rosie Perez).
The central romance that begins between Robbie (Damon J Gillespie)  and the waitress wallflower and new leading lady Lillette (Auli'li Cravalho) causes tons of teenage drama, when the group is not dealing with divorce, teen pregnancy, gender and sexual  identity, and alcoholism.



Where does my local diner fit into the story? Lillette and her mom are waitresses at the diner. She and Robbie practice their lines in between serving pancakes coffee. It blows my mind every time I visit the diner because I can''t believe it's been on TV and in movies (see Brad Pitt's 'True Story' movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Yes, this is the same place my friends and I would meet for the occasional breakfast in high school! It guess it's out version of  The Max, or The Peach Pit.

The restaurant is small, but there are always about 15 cars parked outside. It's impossible to find a spot at 11 AM on a weekend, so you'll park on the nearby residential street and walk over. There can be a wait, but they turn the tables over quickly. The big banners tied up outside (taken down for filming) congratulate the town on the recent 400th anniversary (back in 2016) and champion the high school's sports teams, promising that all of our all athletes are winners. Across the street, there are two strip malls with a deli, nail salon etc... but the diner looks more isolated.

The narrow, rectangular room has big windows with  puffy curtains next to each of the booths.The walls are adorned with local memorabilia, news clippings, and tributes to victims of 9/11.  Regular patrons help themselves to coffee behind the counter. There are about 20 personal mugs that hang on the wall, mostly for the retiree crowd that holds court in there every morning. Weekends have families coming in from soccer practice or little league, and the juice comes in tine 8 oz. glasses. They only take cash, but there's an ATM in the entrance. Nothing on the menu is over $10.00, even the specials with coffee, eggs and toast. It feels like home, and it is my home.

It's a surreal feeling, seeing my hometown on T.V. It's even worse when your town is shown as a  falling apart town in the heart of former mining country. After talking to other kids that grew up here, we sympathized that our town looked pretty bad. Here are some truths and falsehoods.

• Yes, the power plant in the promo is our power plant. It's by the by the town pool, and it's not really operational anymore. They show alleged that shutting down the wines ruined the town and made everyone poor.  This story is slightly different; shutting down the plant increased the school taxes a ton.
• The abandoned factory where the kids hung out was abandoned, but in  the 1930's when the town stopped being the brick-making capitol of the world. It had been operational since the civil war. It was used to make solider uniforms.  It's been revitalized over the last 15 years and rebuilt after hurricane Sandy damage. The building houses restaurants, artist studios, a brewery, a yoga studio, and some industrial design showrooms.
• The downtown street, called 'the village' and the school front they show do not represent the decor of the whole town. This particular section of town is down by the river and has a few blocks of old, cute (brick) historical buildings. Down the street from the village, from there are high-rise condos and the majority of the houses in the town were built post 1970. The middle school building has been around since the early 1900's and used to  be the only school in town, but we have about 8 schools in the district now.