Two friends conceived of the event as way to bring attention to small businesses in downtown Brighton.
This time, they’re ready.
Last September, two enterprising Brighton residents — beauty boutique owner Kathleen London and social media content creator Laura Boote — launched an event where they transformed their city’s downtown into Stars Hollow, the fictional Connecticut setting of their favorite TV show, “Gilmore Girls.” They expected 5,000 people to show up and were walloped when about 40,000 fans of the show swarmed the town to participate in the grassroots experience, designed to highlight Brighton’s small businesses as much as it was to celebrate the show.
Now comes the sequel. Destination Stars Hollow — which is not in any way affiliated with Warner Brothers Television, which owns the rights to “Gilmore Girls” — returns to Brighton this weekend, and London and Boote have been working around the clock for months to ensure it’s a success. And they’re working to right-size the event, hoping for the same turnout as last year but preparing for up to 60,000 attendees at the three-day celebration, while making sure it doesn’t get too big and lose the small-town charm that is at the very heart of the experience.
“It has to throttle at some point, and we’re doing everything we can to throttle it,” says London, 56. “We’ve been doing a lot less social media, a lot less pushing out. We don’t sponsor posts. We are making sure it’s the people who came (last year), friends of friends, word-of-mouth, if you know, you know. We’re doing everything humanly possible to keep it local-ish, fun, and under control.”
The rest is in the stars (Hollow), as the picturesque Livingston County downtown, about a half hour north of Ann Arbor, prepares to become the home of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore and play host to thousands of the show’s obsessives from all over the country.
Hay bales and corn stalks were delivered this week, along with mums and pumpkins, to give the town that forever fall feeling of Stars Hollow. Businesses are cosplaying as “Gilmore Girls” establishments — 2 Dandelions Bookshop is becoming Stars Hollow Books, El Arbol Taqueria is masquerading as Al’s Pancake World, and Lynn’s on First will turn into the iconic Luke’s Diner — all in an effort to capture the vibe and atmosphere of the hit TV show, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and ran for seven seasons from 2000 to 2007.
London and Boote say they’re expecting attendees from up to 35 U.S. states, and they’re playing host to two stars from the show: Scott Patterson, who plays grumpy but lovable diner owner Luke, and Metro Detroit native Rose Abdoo, who plays Gypsy, the town mechanic.
It’s all a dream come true for fans of “Gilmore Girls,” and London and Boote say if there is a year three, they’re happy to hand off organizing duties to a third party who can give it the love and attention it deserves.
“We can’t scale as fast as the event is scaling,” says London. “We’re just two girls with a dream.”
Brighton’s Lorelai and Rory
London and Boote met a few years ago and became fast friends, bonding over their shared love of “Gilmore Girls,” the charming show about a mother and daughter living in a small town in Connecticut, which, thanks to its ubiquity on streaming, has only gained popularity in recent years. (The show is currently available to watch on Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu, and also airs daily in blocks on the Hallmark Channel.)
“Gilmore Girls” is filled with quirky characters and idiosyncratic business owners, like the ones who populate any small town, argues Boote, 24. “Everybody basically lives in a little Stars Hollow,” she says. “You just have to focus on it, and pay attention to what you have in your downtown.”
London and Boote began joking about which people and businesses in downtown Brighton they would compare to characters on the show, and the nugget of an idea was born: What if, as a way to promote small businesses in Brighton, they replicated Stars Hollow and had each of the downtown Brighton businesses adopt the personalities of their “Gilmore Girls” counterparts, like Small Business Saturday with a pop culture twist?
Thus, Destination Stars Hollow was born, and their inside joke turned into a civic project. It’s not the first or only “Gilmore Girls” fan event — the show has inspired celebrations in several Connecticut cities, including Guilford’s The Firelight Event, which has been running for 10 years, and New Milford’s A Weekend in the Life — but there’s plenty of “Gilmore” love to go around.
London and Boote enlisted the participation of 40 downtown Brighton businesses and launched a Facebook page and an Instagram profile to promote the event. Online engagement was high, but they didn’t know until later that the people they were interacting with were largely out-of-towners.
“We thought, OK, maybe the surrounding counties. Maybe Oakland, maybe Washtenaw,” says Boote. “We thought maybe the Upper Peninsula would be the absolute farthest.”
It was actually much farther. An anchor on a news station in Arizona mentioned on-air that she was heading to the event, and one couple flew in from Hawaii. Area hotel rooms were all booked up and car rentals were sold out.
Unknowingly, their little event had gone viral.
As fans arrived in droves and flooded Brighton’s downtown, businesses sold out of merchandise and enjoyed some of their best days on record. People were lined up all day for $5 cups of coffee at Lynn’s on First, which had two-hour waits for orders of burgers and fries, just like the kind Luke serves up on the show. Oh My Lolli!, Brighton’s downtown candy store, completely sold out of stock and was left with nothing but sugar dust on its shelves.
“As far as in-store sales, it was the best day I’ve ever had, times four,” says Oh My Lolli! owner Keith Karp, who has owned his business for 16 years. The store will be back at Destination Stars Hollow this year, transformed into Taylor’s Old Fashioned Soda Shoppe, and Karp has canned his own caramel latte-flavored soda for the event, which he’s selling in commemorative Destination Stars Hollow cans.
“We’ve been preparing for this for the last two or three months,” says Karp, who watched episodes of the series as a way to get into character for the event. “Last year we had no idea what to expect, and obviously it was a huge success, so we’re just hoping to build on that, and we’re really leaning into it.”
For London and Boote, there was no time to exhale after last year’s DSH wrapped, as planning for this weekend began quickly thereafter. And as news of the event’s success rippled through the “Gilmore” world, it even made its way to cast members, including Southfield native Abdoo, who agreed to participate in this year’s event and helped recruit Patterson for an appearance as well.
“I was just so fascinated by the fact they didn’t have anyone from the show in attendance, and yet the fans just wanted to congregate with each other at this event,” says Abdoo, on the phone last week from her home in Glendale, California. “I thought it was incredible how many people showed up just to celebrate the show and celebrate businesses in small towns. I thought that was just the coolest.”
Abdoo and Patterson will be on hand at this weekend’s event for meet-and-greet opportunities and to participate in an hour-long Q&A session entitled “Stars Hollow Secrets.” Abdoo, who played Señorita Rodriguez on “That’s So Raven” and also has a recurring role on HBO Max’s “Hacks,” said interacting with “Gilmore Girls” fans over the years is always a breath of fresh air.
“They’re the most polite, friendly people,” says Abdoo, who has struck up a lasting friendship with a group of fans she calls her “Gilmore Girls OGs.” “It’s really great, and I always say our fans are so well read. There are so many literary references in ‘Gilmore Girls’ and you really have to be a lover of books and old movies to not miss any of those references.”
Destination: Brighton
At ArtVentures, a custom framing and design shop in downtown Brighton, Mara Ikens has been printing up copies of the Stars Hollow Gazette, replicas of the newspaper featured in the show. She’ll be selling them during Destination Stars Hollow for $10 apiece.
“I truly think it’s a magical event,” says Ikens, who owns and runs ArtVentures along with her husband, Devin Kirby. “I think the show itself is so character-driven by the whole town, so why not take a town that’s completely character-driven — we’re all merchants and we all have our own personalities and eccentricities — and do that here? Why wouldn’t we be the perfect town to change for a weekend for that magic?
“I think part of the reason this is such a good event is it takes our town and our people and it’s kind of cosplay for the day, so I get to introduce myself to all these people I otherwise wouldn’t introduce myself to, and they get to see how much we love this town as well as the show itself,” Ikens says.
At the event — it runs 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, with a VIP reception kicking things off from 5-9 p.m. Friday — attendees will be given a Destination Stars Hollow “passport,” which has space for stickers from all of the weekend’s participating businesses, which fans can collect by dropping by each one of the individual businesses.
There are photo ops throughout the town, custom merchandise sales, an Easter Egg hunt, strolling actors and more, all designed to turn Brighton into the world from the show.
London and Boote are working with a team of volunteers who are helping with pulling the event off, but they’re not sure how they’ll continue to work at the same level heading into a third year. For starters, Boote is getting married next summer, and she has a wedding to plan.
London hopes she and Boote can pass off the event to someone who would be able to handle it properly and give it the attention it deserves, and she’s starting at the top.
“At a time when big corporations are seen as the villain, wouldn’t it be great if Warner Brothers came in and was the hero?” she asks. “This event could be held consecutive weeks over the course of the fall in like three or four different towns, and they could be highlighting small towns from California to Maine.
“We have this whole, like, magic dream that Warner Brothers or Hallmark or Warner Brothers would pick up what we’re laying down. They have teams and they have bandwidth and the two of us are drowning, just with this,” she says. “What a great time in the world to be the hero, right? Be the hero.”
London says she’s reached out to Warners but hasn’t heard back, and in the meantime, she and Boote are scurrying to get everything ready for the big weekend. They’re a good team: “We offset each other,” London says. “When she’s crunchy and frustrated, I’m not, or when I’m crunchy and frustrated, she’s not. It works out nicely.”
And it works out nicely for Brighton as well: ArtVentures’ Ikens says Destination Stars Hollow is an event where the town puts its best foot forward.
“Everyone works very hard to make sure it goes off without a hitch. It’s really community-oriented, and there’s something so special about everyone coming together,” she says. “I think it’s the best event of the entire year.”
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