The Golden Ticket: Flossmoor Couple Delight With Wonka-Themed Display

FLOSSMOOR, IL — A Flossmoor couple's fandom of 1971 classic "Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory" is on display for passersby, with a delightful, hand-crafted Wonka-licious lights setup.

Flossmoor native Lilly and husband Andy Weberg began dreaming up their Wonka-mas work of art at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it's taken on a life of its own as they add elements each year, a labor of love unlike anything they've done before. The two wouldn't call themselves professional artists, by any means—they both just dabble—but they have a knack for finding a way to bring their creative visions to fruition.

The themed display at 2327 Hutchison Road features several iconic scenes from the movie, including Violet turning Violet, Charlie finding the golden ticket, Veruca meeting her fate as a "bad egg," Mike being shrunk in the Wonka Vision, Augustus' unfortunate gluttonous dip in the chocolate river and of course—the beloved Oompa Loompas. Even the Fizzy Lifting Drink makes an appearance.

It's a trip into the colorful Wonka-verse made famous by Gene Wilder's portrayal of the purple-clad, mischievous inventor with a twinkle in his eye and a bow tie, top hat and cane. They wanted to do the movie justice, which ultimately would mean they'd have to find a way to make elements move. Nine of the elements of the display are dynamic and move independently.

"I’ve always loved the movie," said Lilly Weberg, "And we kind of just started looking at, 'what do people who don’t have big budgets, how do you make things move?' ... Definitely tricky when neither one of us is an engineer."

The answer: windshield wiper motors.

She would have never thought of that, Lilly said, but that's where her husband comes in. The two have a partnership that takes one's creativity and vision, and the other finds the way to make it happen.

"Andy has a really great imagination," Lilly said. "I’ll come up with a completely wild idea, and he’ll use the left side of his brain to figure out how to make it a reality.

"... It’s a really awesome partnership—we always push each other to see, 'what else can we do?'"

It's an intricate process to create the character at the center of each element. It began with Lilly and Andy re-watching the movie in the most hi-definition version they could find. They then took screenshots of each character's face, and enlarged them in PhotoShop. The bodies of the characters are then sketched, hand-painted and cut out of a heavy-duty chipboard.

Each character took about 36 hours to create, Weberg said. The most challenging task often came down to actually cutting the characters' bodies out.

"Both of us are at-home artists, not professional, but we like to tinker," she said. "... I’m sure there are a lot of tools that people have that could make it easier to cut them, but it’s really difficult."

Weberg, 42, has had a creative side since her childhood, she said, when she lost her father at a young age. Art was an outlet she used to stay positive.

"I liked to write stories, I liked to paint," she said, "I had a really active imagination … painting and drawing—I could only do things that were happy, that made me joyful. I never expressed my sad, angry emotion in art. I used music for that. Music was my escape."

Andy's artistic side surfaced through his work in landscape photography—and then again when his wife would point out a piece of jewelry she liked, and they'd work together to create something similar.

Weberg, who lived in Flossmoor until she was 3 years old before moving to California, found her way back to the community in 2005.

"I just thought it would be such an interesting place to live because of the proximity to be able to take the train downtown, the community being so diverse—I really like that," Weberg said.

The town's setting among beautiful trees, with unique architectural aspects to homes and an overall more "hometown-y" feel, appealed to her. She hadn't thought to formally spread the word about their display prior to this year, because she had enjoyed people stumbling upon it, Weberg said. The display has gained Andy, 45 and a project manager at JP Morgan Chase, and Lilly, an active volunteer and cat foster for South Suburban Humane Society, some praise in their neck of the woods.

"I’m just the witchy cat lady, who makes weird Wonka things," Weberg said, laughing.

They plan to add to the display each year—continuing to build on their painstakingly, lovingly crafted tribute to her favorite movie.

"A lot of non-stop tinkering," Weberg said, of their work on the display, "and a lot of patience."

The display is located at 2327 Hutchison Road, and weather permitting runs daily from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. or midnight.