Atlantic City Weekly

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Sometimes it seems like the Wildwoods are just starting their annual series of special events and fun-filled family activities when other southern New Jersey shore towns are winding down for the year. Weekends on the Wildwoods’ Web site (wildwoodsnj.com) in September and October look like other shore towns’ sites in July and August.

Returning to the Wildwoods this Saturday, Oct. 9, is the annual Seafood & Music Festival, which has gained popularity since its launch two falls ago. Presented  by the Greater Wildwood Chamber of Commerce (GWCC) and starting 11am, the free-admission festival will feature a day of “eating, dancing and all-out fun.” Included will be kids events, hand-crafted goods, pie-eating and chowder-making contests, and five bands performing alternately. And proceeds from the festival are put back into community in the form of scholarships and other praiseworthy purposes.

“Any money we raise either goes into our scholarship foundations so we can award scholarships to local high-school seniors moving on to college, or it goes to the Chamber, in which we’re able to filter that money back into the community with training classes, donations to the Food Bank, things like that,” says Tracey DuFault, executive director of the GWCC. “So it’s a great day of food and fun, but all for a worthy cause.

“We do a pie-eating contest with different categories, and we do a chowder contest with our vendors where they give out samplings and the public gets to vote for the best chowder. Two years in a row The Deck at Holly Beach got the public’s vote, then last year we added a judges category and brought in some discriminating [chowder] palates. They chose Neil’s Steak and Chowder House as the winners of the judges category.”

All the festival vendors are encouraged to do seafood-themed presentations like crab-cake sandwiches, etc., but there will also be the standard festival favorites like burgers, hot dogs, fries and other landlubber fare.

The musical groups performing will be Bandstand, Frank Bey and the Swing City Blues Band, the Good Tymes Band, the Nobody Band, and the Rocktologists. That latter group is a comprised of physicians from the local Cape Regional Medical Center in Cape May Court House. It formed in 2002 as part of a talent show for hospital employees, and they had so much fun doing it they loaned their non-medical expertise to events like the Seafood & Music Fest.

“[The Rocktologists] are local band of doctors from Cape Regional who donate their time and are really wonderful, as are all of our bands,” says DuFault. “We put up two stages and we alternate between the stages throughout the day.

“One of my absolute favorite parts of the festival is the Kidz Korner from noon to 4,” adds DuFault. “We’re so excited to be working with Parties To Go, which is a local business, and we’re bringing in mascots like Sparky and McGruff and Elmer, we’ll have a pumpkin painting contest, there’ll be cotton candy — it’s a lot of fun for the kids. I have a five- and a seven-year-old, so it gives mommy a chance to work and play with them all at the same time. When you do something like that in a community where you live and work in, and your children go to school in, and get to meet all their friends and other kids’ parents, it’s so much fun. It’s almost not even work for me.”

Another big fall event will be happening the following weekend, Oct. 15-17, in the Wildwoods. The seventh annual Fabulous ’50s Weekend will feature Chubby Checker performing live at the Wildwoods Convention Center on Saturday, Oct. 16, to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of his famous dance “The Twist” debuting in the Wildwoods in July 1960.

“We’ll have a lot of surprises for him,” says DuFault. “We’re naming a street after him, we’re giving him a key to the city, and the Cape May Vo-Tech juniors and seniors are baking a cake for him that we’ll present to him on stage. And of course — we have to do this — we’re going to attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people doing The Twist simultaneously.”
See gwcoc.com for more.

3rd Annual Wildwoods Seafood & Music Festival
Where: Atlantic Avenue between Wildwood and Schellenger avenues in the Wildwoods
When: Saturday, Oct. 9, from 11am-7:30pm
How much: Admission is free
Phone: 729-4000