CORTLAND – It's five days before the big day.

The Model A dashes down West Fourth Street. Its driver pulls up to a brick storefront and strolls inside, jaunty, dressed in his Sunday best.

The black-and-white scene turns technicolor, like a Gage County "Pleasantville," as a brunette with cherry red lips leans in with a coffee pot and winks.

Welcome to Paper Moon Pastries, the 1930s-style small-town bakery inspired by a classic movie – its public introduction captured by drone and iPhone.

That spring night, the brunette baker heads home – a short tree-lined stroll away – and edits the footage into 38 nostalgic seconds.

"It's not a commercial if it's not a little corny, right?," she writes on social media. "Share the news!"

Lindsey Oelling is an actress, an artist, a baker, a therapist, a TikTok queen and small town revivalist. She wouldn't be any of it if not for a faulty '55 Chevy and a grandmother she'd never know.

On May 21, 2022, after years of dreaming, months of planning and a frantic week of baking, Oelling retraces her steps to Fourth Street and opens for business for the first time at 7 a.m.

She unlocks the door with 100 cinnamon rolls, two cakes, a tray of cupcakes, a batch of cookies and her best friend Sean Flattery – the fella driving the Model A – on hand to pour coffee.

And when she does...

"The line stretched into the street and around the building and it stayed that way..."

She sells her last cinnamon roll at 8 a.m.

"Two hours later, we were out of everything."

***

It's Friday: Kolache Day.

It's Oelling's day off from her day job as a mental health therapist at Blue Valley Health.

The 31-year-old is wearing a flour-dusted apron in the Paper Moon kitchen. The glass front door drips sweat from the heat of three ovens.

It's a scene out of yesteryear. Historic town photos. NEHI soda bottles. Penny candy in glass jars. There's the dining room mural Oelling painted of a look-alike-Lindsey-swinging on a crescent moon, a nod to the hand-painted ads on small-town brick buildings.

There's the vintage radio and a tattered cigar box, like one Tatum O'Neal toted in "Paper Moon," the 1973 movie she starred in alongside her father, Ryan. The movie Oelling watched with her own dad, cozy on the basement couch, falling in love with its black-and-white charm and the heroine's chutzpah.

"I loved the story," she says. "And the father-daughter dynamic."

People have two questions when she tells them about Paper Moon Pastries – "The best sweet treats this side of 77."

One: "Why would you move to Cortland?"

Two: "Why would you open a bakery there?"

Easy. She found the perfect house in 2016. Her mom grew up here. Her childhood memories are laced with holiday visits to Grandpa's and tractor pulls at Cortland Fest. She loved this town's charm. Its spirit.

And why not a bakery in Cortland, pop. 505?

"I wanted to give people a place to go," she says. "I'm a therapist and a lot of people are lonely – and they don't like to say that."

For years she plied her friends and fellow community theater cast members with "test treats," while sharpening a vision for her bakery: A place to slow down and make memories from food created with love.

Oelling talks as she shapes balls of dough into puffy nests, piping in the filling of Czech heaven. Apricot. Cherry. Cream cheese.

Beside her in the cramped kitchen, Carol Niemeyer peers into an oven. The Dewitt great-grandmother drives three times a week to Cortland, a commuter town between Lincoln and Beatrice.

"My husband died and I need something to keep busy," she says. "This has helped me a lot."

It's helped Oelling, too. She's built Paper Moon Pastries without money for a commercial oven.

She's here until midnight making cinnamon rolls, cakes, cupcakes, cookies and her signature moon bars, frosting and preparing for Saturdays.

Paper Moon Pastries is open Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Monday morning, it's back to her day job. Since the pandemic, she's been counseling clients remotely from the mid-century gem she restored – posting the transformation on TikTok and gaining 65,000 followers.

Dad was the cookie maker growing up, she says. She inherited his chocolate-chip recipe. Mom bakes the Paper Moon pies.

Lindsey Oelling is the oldest of Kent and Lori Oelling's three kids.

She grew up near Roca in a house her great-grandfather built. She went to school at Norris.

When she was nine, her little brother was diagnosed with leukemia. She and her baby sister spent lots of time with Grandma Jean – Dad's mom – while their parents trekked to an Omaha hospital.

"We'd wake up and make pancakes in the morning," Oelling says. "And I'd help her make kolaches."

Grandma Jean made cinnamon rolls, too, using her soft-and-sweet dough recipe.

It's the dough Oelling makes now; enough for 400 cinnamon rolls and 400 kolaches each week.

There wouldn't be a Paper Moon without Grandma Jean, she says.

There wouldn't be a Paper Moon without Grandma Lorene, either.

***

It was Aug. 27, 1983.

Kent and Lori Oelling had been married two weeks.

Lori's sister was moving and Lori was there to help unpack. Her parents were there, too – Lorene and Raymond Thomsen.

Kent was on his way to lend some muscle, but his '55 Chevy kept cutting out on the highway, so he turned around and returned to Roca.

After lunch, Lori's mom told her to go be with her husband. You're a newlywed, she said.

"She practically kicked me out," Lori says.

Lorene shooed her husband Raymond out, too. He had a sore shoulder. Go, she said.

After they left, the house exploded. Propane leak. Lori's sister, her sister's husband and the husband's mother died. Lorene died, too.

Seven years later, Lori gave birth to her and Kent's first child, Lindsey.

A creative girl with a big heart, Lori says. "An old soul in a young body."

When her little brother got sick, Lindsey Oelling started the Toy Box of Love Fund and convinced her fellow fourth graders to make Christmas ornaments to sell. They raised $5,000 for toys for kids hospitalized at Nebraska Medicine.

After college, she moved in with and cared for her ailing Grandma Jean.

Oelling had her own health troubles. An autoimmune disease. Tumors on her thyroid. A blood test suggesting cancer.

"She's been through a lot," her mom says. "Knowing I lost my family so young and her own scares, it put everything in perspective for her."

Oelling says the same thing while working in her Paper Moon kitchen.

"I've always felt like there's not enough time," she says. "That you shouldn't wait for things to happen."

You should make them happen.

***

Rich Douglass is Oelling's landlord.

The retired ag teacher watched the young baker transform a shuttered hair salon – last in a line of failed businesses on the block – taking down walls, pulling up linoleum and refinishing booths snagged from an Omaha Schlotzsky's. Then he watched her business blossom.

"I've got a bet going to guess when there's not going to be a line down the block."

Oelling is a force for Cortland, he says.

In September, she organized the Over the Moon Fall Festival with 20 vendors, a dog costume contest, vintage car show and chili cookoff. The town flooded with people on a sunny Saturday. She gave away her homemade treats and guests donated $1,700 for Cortland.

"She pretty much single-handedly creates an event and gets people to be involved," Douglass said. "She's got the young guns."

Devin Schroeder is a young gun. The 32-year-old and his wife Jenny opened Homestead Convenience – gas station and homemade pizza joint - on the west side of Highway 77, a few months before Paper Moon opened.

"We're both trying to revive the town a bit; it was needing a boost," Schroeder says."Anytime we go to Paper Moon, we walk away and we're so happy she's here."

Lisa Kohout, chair of the Cortland Village Board, walks away happy, too – though she sometimes drives by first to check the line.

"We have people from all over who drive in to go to her business. It's just something we've been missing in town for a long time."

***

West Fourth Street bustles on November's second Saturday, nary a parking spot to be found.

It's been six months since Oelling starred in that iPhone commercial.

Six months of cherry red lipstick and vintage dresses and Flattery in a bowtie, serving coffee.

It takes more than two to run this sweet show.

The baker's parents are here most Saturdays, and Niemeyer, the widow from Dewitt, and Ben Huenemann, Oelling's boyfriend, washing dishes.

It's late morning when Oelling sells the last piece of Death by Chocolate cake. She admires the pink lipstick on a little girl from Roca and serves a cherry-frosted cupcake to her 4-year-old brother. She boxes cinnamon rolls and kolaches. She asks people where they're from. How they're doing.

This is her favorite day of the week.

Oelling will soon turn 32. She's starting a private therapy practice. She's dreaming a bigger dream.

In the crowded dining room with its lookalike-Lindsey swinging on a Paper Moon, two Beatrice friends finish their pastries.

"It's a cute little place for a get-together," Mary Scherling says.

"It's quaint," Jolene Pike adds.

Then she leans closer and lowers her voice.

"It needs to be bigger if it keeps going this way."

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