V3 oct 2016

Page 37

Hawaii, even people from as far as France,” she explains. On the corner of Main Street, Rhodena Buck, owner of “The Woodbury Shoppe,” fittingly named after the fictional zombie safe-haven community of season three, prepares her shop before opening the door to let in this weekend’s tourists, hungry for some morbid merchandise. “Basically, due to the filming of ‘The Walking Dead’ and the fact that downtown Senoia was Woodbury for the third season, a lot of tourists were coming into town looking for memorabilia from the show,” Buck says. “Out of need, and to meet people’s requests, we opened The Woodbury Shoppe.” Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Buck describes the Senoia of eight years ago, before she and her family moved to this small southern pocket just a short time before the beginning of “The Walking Dead.” “It was really just a sleepy little town,” she recalls. “The developers had already started developing a lot of the town to be used for movie sets – the brownstones were in the works and we had some good restaurants – but it was just your typical little southern town.” Buck, too, has seen her share of not-solocal tourists come through her shop to find their own piece of zombified memorabilia. “We have had people from all over the world come through – people from Germany, Europe, Asia – and we always ask them what brought them all this way,” she says. “They say they came to see ‘The Walking Dead.’” Buck turns as someone knocks on the front door of the shop and excuses herself, saying, “I have to go let in the teddy bear girl.” At the door stands a girl – a young actress

looking as though she took the wrong bus on her way to L.A. – named Addy Miller. At the age of 10, Miller was the first representation of makeup artist Greg Nicotero’s zombified citizens to appear on the show. She enters the shop with her entourage, including her mother, grandmother, artist Scott Spillman and a trailing impersonator portraying “Abraham” from the show. Today, Miller has come to Senoia not only to sign the T-shirts, posters and pictures of the numerous “walker stalkers” that are patiently trailing her entourage, but to sign a very important wall within the Woodbury Shoppe. At the back of the store lies a stairway entrance leading down to what only can be described as a super fan’s dreamland, a “Walking Dead” one-room museum. In the museum, designed to replicate a room out of the prison from season two, fans can get an up-close look at real set props, including Daryl’s first makeshift chopper, pieces of the demolished Woodbury Town Hall, and an all-too-realistic replica of a “walker.” Along the walls are the signatures of almost every iconic character from the show. Today, Miller’s own mark is inscribed on the wall along with a few “hearts, because I’m happy to be here,” she says. But if, by chance, the governor's floating zombie heads leave something to be desired, fans can always float a layer of whipped cream atop a French vanilla latte at The Waking Dead Café, conveniently attached to the museum. Ashley New, manager of the café, is happy to quench the caffeine cravings of thirsty fans. “We have all kinds of people come through the café; we see a lot of people on their way to Disney or Orlando; however, we have a lot of people that come to vacation here for the

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