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Is strange, creepy, morbid, and odd your jam? Because if it is, the second Annual Central Coast Oddities & Curiosities Show is the place to be on Saturday, Sept. 13, in the Madonna Inn's Alex Madonna Expo Center.
Hosted by Menagerie Oddities Market—whose motto is "This ain't yer grannies craft fair"—the event is a daylong experience filled with vendors, displays, entertainment, food and drink, and more.
Menagerie Oddities Market was founded by Bay Area resident Connstance Garcia, who explained the show's origins during a recent phone call.
"I was an accountant for 30 years, and I had a hobby of making doll head lamps. I couldn't find a place to sell them, so I had gone to an oddities flea market in Southern California. People weren't doing that up here, so we didn't really have a place for alternative artists to sell their wares.
"I told my husband on the way back, 'Let's throw one together.' And we did that. The first one was in 2019. And it just took off from there. We've been doing it ever since."
What began as a one-off has turned into a cottage industry for the Garcias. They now organize and mount 20 to 30 events a year between California, Nevada, and Oregon.
"They're very curated; they're very small," Garcia explained. "It's not like a big oddities expo where you have 100 or 200 vendors. It's 50 to 70, and it's all handmade."
The show is scheduled for Saturday, but there's also a smaller and more exclusive event on Friday, Sept. 12.
"On Friday evening, the night before, we're having an artist preview and masquerade dinner and dance, so if people want to come, they can meet the artists, and they get some goodies and have a nice dinner at the Madonna Inn. It'll be fun."
The dinner and masquerade ball take place outside at the motel's Secret Garden, and Garcia hopes attendees will get into the spirit of the event and come in their finest outfits and wear masks.
"On Saturday, we've got a whole schedule of performers that are going to be there throughout the day," Garcia noted. "We've also got some workshops. We've got a doll head lamp making class [$87]. We've got a butterfly pinning [$80] and moth pinning [$85]. There are 70 vendors this year, so people can come walk around and look at all the exhibits."
One special Saturday highlight will be a vampire display. Actress Maila Nurmi (1922-2008) was best known for creating the campy 1950s TV host Vampira, and Michelle Perry, preservationist for Nurmi's estate, will display some of her possessions and offer a lecture about the famous actress who also appeared in outsider auteur Ed Wood's famously campy cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space.
"There's a DJ, a sideshow performer," Garcia added. "He's called Panda the Clown. He's local there to San Luis. We've got Kiki, the contortionist. She's also local to San Luis. Then we've got Avalanche. She's a burlesque performer. She'll be doing a couple of numbers, too. We've got a whole day of fun, weird, strange things going on."
Your $10 entry allows you to come and go throughout the day, Garcia said, adding that there'll be a full bar and a food truck and other food vendors.
"People can just come at their leisure and hang out and have a good time," she said. "Friday night we'll have a limited number of tickets, and it's getting pretty close to the maximum capacity that we have for that one."
In other words, buy tickets now if you want to attend Friday night.
Maybe you're reading this and thinking, why? Why the odd, macabre, morbid, and weird?
"It's something different that has always been a natural curiosity, but it's something that's more mainstream now and it's more acceptable," Garcia asserted. "I would say that people from Gen Z up to Gen X, now are, you know, we're working, we're professionals, we can afford to buy the things that we want and go to places we want to go and do the things we want to do. And so, I think that's why people are drawn to it but also celebrating it.
"In Western culture, we don't really gravitate toward or celebrate things that people might find macabre," she continued. "Like, when people die, there's this whole memento mori thing. Even a menagerie of animals, you know—those were things that throughout civilization, throughout different periods of time, were normal or celebrated, and they haven't been for a long time, and then I think in the last 10 years, it's just really taken off and become more of the mainstream thing.
"You know, as a community, we've all come together and it's very diverse," she concluded. "Just the people that we've met, the different artists and performers and our patrons and the public and the venues that we work with, everybody is just so amazing, and still open to what we're doing. It's a great community to be part of." Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
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