by Larry Bleiberg, Gabriela Gomez-Misserian, Jordan P. Hickey, Jennifer Stewart Kornegay, Lindsey Liles, and T. Edward Nickens

Marsupial Madness
On Groundhog Day, Southerners looking for a harbinger of spring need not rely on Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil. In Northeast Alabama, his scruffy-haired kindred spirit Sand Mountain Sam, a prognosticating possum who pops out of a whiskey barrel in search of his shadow, has been on the job since 1993. In 2022, Bama Bucks restaurant and exotic animal park in Sardis City became Sam’s home, and bluegrass bands, buck dancers, and spoon players joined the lineup. But the tradition almost ended up roadkill: Authorities were cracking down on illegal possum possession. Armed with the necessary licenses, Bama Bucks’s owner, Terry Turk, rushed to adopt one from a breeder (yes, possum breeders exist). In 2024, almost a thousand folks witnessed the new Sam’s forecast, requiring the event’s move to a bigger facility in Boaz. And with February 2 falling on a Sunday this year, Sam’s prediction has been moved up to January 31. “Its hillbilly flavor speaks to who we are in a fun way,” Turk says. “We’re out there cheering a possum. What’s more fun than that?”
Blind Ambition
“Subterranean rivers are magical, otherworldly places,” says Danté Fenolio, the vice president of the Center for Conservation and Research at San Antonio Zoo in Texas. A cave specialist, Fenolio heads deep underground to document the strange species there—like the Ozark cavefish, a sightless, ghostly, two-inch-long fish that lives only in the limestone cave systems of the Springfield Plateau in the Ozarks of Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Pollution of the groundwaters these fish call home poses great risk to the sensitive creatures, who are federally listed as threatened. Fenolio studies them in northwestern Arkansas, which boasts the best-known population, and in other locations. Even as he pieces together their mysterious lives in the wild, he wants to learn to breed them in captivity, too, in case of emergency. Thanks to a new partnership with an Indigenous group in Oklahoma, in late winter and early spring he hopes to collect the Ozark cavefish that flooding events spit out into streams on Native lands and bring them to his lab for breeding—the next step in ensuring their future.

Split Personality
Four clocks hang in the Gulf County Welcome Center in Port St. Joe, labeled “Eastern Time,” “Central Time,” “Vacation Time” (which has no hands), and “Gulf County Time,” the numbers of which lie in a jumbled mess at the bottom of the clock-face. Of the four, the last timepiece is always the most accurate. As a St. Petersburg Times columnist once wrote of the county, “Time hereabouts is wonderfully theoretical, running on double clockwork.” The reason for the chronic confusion: As one of a handful of time zone–straddling counties nationwide, Gulf County is a house divided, temporally speaking: Thanks to the meddling of some long-ago railroad tycoons, Central time dictates much of the county’s northern half, while Eastern time prevails along the Gulf coast. Predictably, this makes for quirks—head seven-odd miles east from the aforementioned welcome center, for example, and you’ll be an hour younger on Chicago time—and at least one designated selfie spot: an oversize half-blue, half-green Adirondack chair bisected by time zones near Mexico Beach. Everything gets even more confusing when daylight savings rolls around on March 9, although most visitors won’t even notice. After all, they’re on Vacation Time.
Strings Theory
From fuzzy finger puppets to larger-than-life marionettes, puppets come in myriad shapes, sizes, and hues. Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts celebrates them in all their iterations, as well as their talented makers. Through March 16, the Puppetry NOW exhibition, for instance, raises the curtain on living legend puppeteer Raymond Carr’s multifaceted skills. “Carr’s a Center alum, working here as a teen, and stands out as a builder and performer,” explains museum director Kelsey Fritz. “Not all puppeteers do both.” Carr’s commercial projects include working with massive animatronic reptiles in the Walking with Dinosaurs arena show, and training actor Benedict Cumberbatch to be a puppeteer on Netflix’s hit series Eric. He also pulls the strings on creatures born of his imagination in films he directs and with his company, Ninja Puppet Productions. And while puppetry’s pretend worlds delight kids, Carr’s work for Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers and his age-eighteen-plus live show coming this summer to the Center prove it’s not all child’s play. “We’re family friendly, but not a children’s museum,” Fritz says. “Carr shows how puppetry can explore adult themes, too.”
A Caver’s Legacy
A century after the tragic death of Floyd Collins, an exhibit and special tours at Mammoth Cave National Park will recognize the plight of the local caver, who became a national obsession when he was trapped and died in a Kentucky cavern in 1925. The seventeen-day ordeal to first try to rescue him, then to recover his body, made headlines, creating a media circus that eventually inspired a movie and a 1996 musical, Floyd Collins, which will be revived in March at both Lincoln Center, in New York, and in Bowling Green. Collins got stuck as he explored a grotto he hoped to develop for tourists, and crowds soon gathered as rescuers struggled to free him. One newspaper reporter even crawled into a passage for an exclusive interview, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage. “It was a massive news event,” says Molly Schroer, a modern-day park ranger. “Some accounts say thousands showed up. They brought their families and picnic blankets.” Importantly for Kentucky, the tragedy brought attention to Mammoth, the world’s longest cave system, leading to the national park’s founding. Collins’s courage also resulted in improved safety measures and endless interest in the caves, Schroer says. “People come here and find them fascinating. It’s the unknown and the darkness.”
Unvarnished Truth
When Edward Ward Jr. was growing up in Natchitoches in the 1950s, he would visit the city’s train station on hot summer days: “We stopped in there—on the colored side, of course—to get water and rest,” he says. Even as a young child, he recognized the injustice of segregation. “Our water fountains were at room temperature, and the refrigerated water fountain was on the white side,” Ward recalls. Years later, the longtime community leader worked to preserve the building, which closed in the late sixties and recently reopened as the visitor center for Cane River Creole National Historical Park. The Italianate and Spanish Revival station has kept its separate Black and white entrances and waiting rooms intact. “It retains the architecture of discrimination,” says park ranger Barbara Justice. Exhibits in the former Texas & Pacific Railway Depot chronicle local African American history, from plantation enslavement to the civil rights movement. Ward says he’s proud of the restoration, and the message it sends. “You can’t change history, no matter how painful it is, no matter how inappropriate it is,” he says. “But you can preserve it and learn a lesson, and never ever, ever go back there.”
The Tao of Bao
Bao is about to go big time in Rockville. Local chef Kevin Hsieh, a competitor on the Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race, is expanding from a ghost kitchen serving takeout to a dine-in fast-casual restaurant. But the specialty will remain the same: Taiwanese street food, and especially the fluffy Chinese steamed buns called bao. Television host Tyler Florence recalls them as “nothing short of extraordinary… a perfect blend of flavor and texture. I have no doubt that his bao will quickly become a local favorite.” Hsieh’s restaurant’s name, Bao Bei, plays on a Mandarin term of endearment meaning “precious one.” Indeed, the dish is precious to Hsieh, who took inspiration from his grandmother’s bao: “It’s the recipe I used to eat as a child.” He expects his bestseller will continue to be his pork belly bao, which are bigger and meatier than typical slider-sized bao, he says. “People are always stunned by the size of them. One is a meal.”

Threading Through Time
When the Kohler Foundation gave the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson a stack of 131 quilts from the collection of famed Southern photographer Roland L. Freeman, the museum also inherited the oral histories of many of the makers behind the threads. Freeman, who lived in Washington, D.C., and died in 2023, had a very important wish: for the quilts, most of them crafted in Mississippi, to return home. “Museums have the power to do a reparative approach to storytelling,” says Sharbreon S. Plummer, the guest and lead curator for the resulting Of Salt + Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, which runs until April 13. Plummer interviewed local quilters and combed through Freeman’s meticulous archive of documents to carry forward the photographer’s work and legacy with care. “To be able to have attribution for these quilters and a window into their inner life was not something we were always afforded,” Plummer says, noting that, in many collections countrywide, it is not uncommon to see quilts credited to anonymous makers. “Roland opened the pathway for me to dig.” Of Salt + Spirit, which showcases more than fifty quilts, includes Freeman’s transcripts, negative sheets, and proud portraits of the artists before their kaleidoscopic masterworks.
Lens on the Lowcountry
Beaufort has long played a role in filmmaking history, serving as a backdrop to such classics as Forrest Gump, The Big Chill, and The Prince of Tides. But the charming coastal town also stakes a claim in the film industry’s future through the annual Beaufort International Film Festival. From February 18 to 23, veteran and aspiring filmmakers from the South and beyond screen their work in front of some 15,000 festivalgoers. Every morning at 9:00, the show begins: Documentaries, short films, animations, and comedies start rolling in the 450-person-capacity Center for the Arts. “The atmosphere is just electric,” says Ron Tucker, who has codirected the festivities along with his wife, Rebecca—and conducted a post-screening Q&A session with each filmmaker—for the past nineteen years. Of more than five hundred entries, only about fifty-five make the cut, and an advisory panel that includes South Carolina native Andie MacDowell and filmmaker Julie Dash names the winners in a slew of categories (there’s also an Audience Choice award). “We choose films that are story-driven, and that make an impact,” Tucker says. “We want the audience to stand up and cheer, to laugh or cry, or get so angry they want to take action.”

A Steak House, Well Done
Thad Eure Jr. was a big man, with a large personality and a generations-long impact on the North Carolina food and social scene. It’s little surprise that his favorite dish at his signature Angus Barn restaurant in Raleigh was a massive two-person cut of decadent chateaubriand, served tableside with a red-wine-and-shallot sauce and a heaping cornucopia of vegetables. Eure died in 1988, but his “Big Red” steak house remains a paragon of old-school epicureanism and modern culinary relevance. The landmark celebrates its sixty-fifth anniversary this year, with a slate of special events and tributes, among them the revival of cherished Angus Barn family recipes—including Eure’s chateaubriand. The focus of the monthslong party for Big Red, says Van Eure, Thad and Alice Eure’s daughter and the current proprietor, is to spread the love. “So many people feel that we’ve been a huge part of their lives, across generations,” she says. To that end, Angus Barn will highlight recipes from Walter Royal, the late and revered Angus Barn chef who won on Iron Chef America in 2006. The anniversary year also includes intimate wine dinners in the Angus Barn’s twenty-eight-thousand-bottle wine cellar and a June 27–29 gala weekend featuring a sixties-themed bash at Big Red’s soaring outdoor pavilion.
Rock and Rolling On
Seventy-five years ago, Sam Phillips signed a lease on a former auto garage, named it Memphis Recording Service, and filled it with sound. “He went out and found music that other people were not recording,” says Nina Kathleen Jones, the studio’s current operations manager. Phillips soon released what historians consider the first rock-and-roll song, “Rocket 88,” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. The spot, which became known as Sun Studio, also signed Elvis, who later had a chance meeting in the building with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Their impromptu jam session was immortalized as the Million Dollar Quartet. Now Sun is a bona fide tourist attraction, bringing in 200,000 visitors a year—and most likely more for 2025’s anniversary. The highlight remains the humble studio, where visitors line up to pose for a picture with the Shure 55-series microphone once used by Elvis. But Sun still makes music, too. Josh Shaw, a tour guide and the lead singer of Blvck Hippie, recorded there in 2020. The experience, he said, gave him goose bumps: “It feels like hallowed ground.”

Big Whoop
Only seven hundred wild whooping cranes remain in the world, researchers estimate, and from November to March, nearly all of them turn up on Mustang Island in the Gulf of Mexico to overwinter around the town of Port Aransas. In the mid-twentieth century, the huge wading birds—which stand five feet tall with a nearly eight-foot wingspan and are named for their loud, bugling call—almost went extinct due to hunting and habitat loss. Conservation efforts have restored this single wild population, whose migration is such a rare sight that 1,500 people a year make the trip to Port Aransas for the city’s annual Whooping Crane Festival (February 20–23). Over those four days, visitors attend talks, help clear invasive species like Brazilian peppertree from wetlands, and take tours to view the cranes picking through the coastal marshes for blue crabs in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Brett Stawar, president of the Port Aransas Tourism Bureau, says this year’s new boat and kayak tours will afford avian admirers an even closer look. “The festival is a culmination of conservation and celebration,” he says. “Seeing these birds and hearing their calls is a reminder of their resilience.”
Feast for the Senses
You might not know the name Alphonse Mucha, but you certainly know the artist’s style. His work at the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris helped launch art nouveau, a design movement defined by its soft pastels and flowing patterns inspired by nature. You’ll recognize it from vintage Grateful Dead posters, tattoo art, video games, and manga comics, all of which make an appearance in Eternally New: The Art Nouveau World of Alphonse Mucha, at Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art. The exhibition, which runs through March 16, includes posters, prints, sculptures, and the U.S. debut of a Mucha immersive art experience developed by Paris’s Grand Palais Immersif and the Mucha Foundation in Prague. A room-sized projection transports visitors to Mucha’s world. “The posters come to life,” says Taubman executive director Cindy Petersen. “You feel like you’re being pulled in.” Visitors can even sniff Mucha’s vibrant world at scent stations, which capture the smell of the paints and polished floor of his studio, the Czech forests of his childhood, and the perfume of actress Sarah Bernhardt, whom the artist featured in advertising posters. “There’s a feeling of wonderment,” Petersen says. “It’s like you’re stepping into each of the works.”
Testing the Waters
Still waters may run deep, but that doesn’t mean they all taste the same. Every February, visitors descend on the historic spa town of Berkeley Springs to put H₂O to the test at the International Water Tasting competition. This winter, February 20–22, the contest celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary, once again gathering judges to sip, savor, and rank entries from around the globe in what organizers call the world’s longest-running and most prestigious water rating event, with categories that include municipal, purified, and sparkling. Since the event’s start, tastings have been led by Arthur von Wiesenberger, an industry consultant who has written three books on bottled water and serves as the event’s Water Master. “Our goal is to celebrate water that tastes great,” he says, with evaluators scrutinizing entries for appearance, aroma, mouthfeel, taste, and aftertaste. There’s also a public tasting, which culminates in a “water rush,” when attendees are let loose on a giant display of bottles provided by the competing water companies. “People bring their bags and boxes,” says event organizer Jill Klein Rone. “We do the countdown, and in a matter of minutes, all that water is gone.”