This week I’ve been recounting my experience of how I first opened the museum. You can read the first two installments here and here.
    After settling on the name “Museum of the Weird” and acquiring some cool attractions to put on display, I decided I had to open it in time for one of our biggest events of the year, the spring Pecan Street Festival, which was only a week or so away at the time. I knew the size of the crowd we’d get that weekend we wouldn’t see again for several more months, so I wanted to seize upon the opportunity, even though there was almost nothing completed in the way of construction of the museum. So I labored day and night trying to get the exhibits finished, sometimes pulling all nighters, sometimes skipping a couple of meals just to work through the day.
    Finally, the time came to share my creation with the rest of the world. The date was May 5th, 2007. I was very excited, and a little bit nervous. As we opened the doors that first morning of the Pecan Street Festival, people slowly started to trickle in, then as the afternoon progressed, more and more people were coming in. Before I knew it, the place was crowded to capacity, and there was a line of people waiting to get in.  And I was afraid nobody was going to show up!
    And did all those hours of work pay off? Well, monetarily it was a success. But, to be completely honest, the initial  reviews were, how shall we say… less than stellar. 
    I’d say about half of the people who came out were disappointed, the other half loved it. The ones who loved it seemed to get the fact that this was a sideshow in the tradition of P.T. Barnum and the dime museums of old. The ones who were disappointed mainly seemed like they expected more and wanted to get more bang for their buck. Some people thought it was a haunted house, and didn’t understand that it was just a sideshow exhibit. Others just assumed that everything in there was all fake (which, I can assure you, is not the case). While I was definitely grateful for all the people who loved it, part of me was frustrated that not everyone enjoyed it. I would think “for $3, what were they expecting, Disneyworld?” But I also realized that billing the place as a “museum” instead of a sideshow may have been a mistake at first. The biggest complaint was that everyone wanted to see more. 
    So from this experience, I learned a couple of valuable lessons. One was, no matter how hard you try to entertain the public, you just can’t please all the people all the time. To quote the great Bill Cosby, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”  
    I also learned I did have a specific audience who love and appreciate what I am doing. I had found my niche. And for those people, the true fans of the weird, I was going to do everything in my power to really make this museum something they would not soon forget!  I wanted this place to become legendary.
     And so began my quest over the ensuing years to constantly expand, improve, and perfect the Museum of the Weird. Today, while the physical space is still small, I finally feel like we have enough exhibits to call the place a true museum… it’s outgrown it’s initial incarnation as a tiny sideshow.  And the reviews have steadily gotten better month after month, to the point now where almost every single person who comes in has a satisfying experience.
    And my quest is ongoing. In fact, it may be never-ending, as I constantly embark on my search to bring to you the bizarre, the strange, the unusual…the WEIRD!  I hope you come visit if you’re ever in Austin, TX, and I hope you have as much fun exploring our museum as I had putting it together for you!  
-Steve Busti

Two days ago I had begun to tell the tale of how the museum came about (you can read it here), but I mainly focused on our gift shop, Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts. Today I’ll continue to explore how our gift shop eventually gave birth to the Museum of the Weird.

    As I mentioned earlier, my concept for Lucky Lizard was to be a curiosity shop of bizarre oddities for sale, mixed in with more merchandisable items like t-shirts, postcards, etc.  Well, as I found out, it was not an easy task to consistently stock a gift shop full of unusual, one-of-a-kind objects for sale, mainly because after you’ve tracked some cool item down, purchased it and then put it on the shelf for resale, once you sell that item it is gone and you’ll never get it back — ever. I’m not talking about some antique or collectible that, although possibly rare and valuable, there were probably hundreds or thousands of its kind in existence. No, I’m talking about an object that there is nothing else like it in the world, a true one-of-a-kind. After selling off several really cool things (and later regretting it), I decided maybe I could just display the remaining items in the shop, but mark them “Not For Sale”. 
    Well, in the back of the store I had a large glass display case that I was using as a terrarium to house two large lizards, my 15 year old iguana Simone and a 10 year old nile monitor I dubbed Torgo (bonus points if you can guess where the name came from. Hint: MST3K). After realizing people kept coming in to the store just to see the lizards, and not buying anything, I jokingly thought “gee, maybe we can start charging admission!”  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it might not be a bad idea. After all, we did have a large section in the back of the store that was not really being used, and I probably had collected enough strange and unusual objects that we could actually make a small “museum” (actually more the size of a sideshow than a legitimate museum) and the lizards would be the main attraction. So I took the remaining NFS items from the store, and began my search in earnest for even more strange exhibits for my Freakatorium. 
    In the beginning, besides the lizards I only had three star attractions to display: a one-eyed cyclops pig that had been freeze-dried and mounted; a shrunken head I had on loan from a collector; and a fiji mermaid. While still a miniscule collection, I felt it was enough to open to the public soon as a small sideshow attraction. I originally wanted to call it “The Freakatorium,” but had found out there already was one in NYC owned and operated by Johnny Fox (I think it has since closed down). I knew that Austinites already considered themselves “weird” — our city’s unofficial motto is “Keep Austin Weird.” So I decided to capitalize on the popularity of the slogan and named it the “Museum of the Weird.” Now, all I had to do was build it… and see if anyone would come!

TO BE CONTINUED!
FRIDAY: Part 3 of 
The Origin of the Museum of the Weird!

Congratulations, you are here from Day 1…

Greetings, and welcome to the new and improved museumoftheweird.com website! I’m very excited about what this website will bring to you along the lines of breaking news, original articles, and enough photographs and videos to whet your appetite for the weird!
I know it may not look like much for now, but beginning tomorrow in our first post, we will give you an idea of what the Museum of the Weird is, how it came to be, and what the purpose of this website will serve. You were lucky enough to find us on Day 1 of our website relaunch, and we hope you will continue on with us as we take you on an exciting and remarkable journey into the WEIRD….
–Steve Busti, owner of Museum of the Weird
In the meantime, don’t forget you can still shop the Museum of the Weird on our store site, luckylizard.net 

Greetings, and welcome to the new and improved museumoftheweird.com website! I’m very excited about what this website will bring to you along the lines of breaking news, original articles, and enough photographs and videos to whet your appetite for the weird!
I know it may not look like much for now, but beginning tomorrow in our first post, we will give you an idea of what the Museum of the Weird is, how it came to be, and what the purpose of this website will serve. You were lucky enough to find us on Day 1 of our website relaunch, and we hope you will continue on with us as we take you on an exciting and remarkable journey into the WEIRD….
–Steve Busti, owner of Museum of the Weird
In the meantime, don’t forget you can still shop the Museum of the Weird on our store site, luckylizard.net 

    Hello, and welcome to the first official blog for the Museum of the Weird!  However you may have found us, we’re just glad that you did.  Now you may be asking yourself, “What is this Museum of the Weird?”  I’ll attempt to answer that in the next couple of entries, since what the Museum started out as is beginning to morph into something much grander than what I had originally intended it to be… which I’m very excited to share with you.
    Back in July 2005, my wife and I had the opportunity to open our own little gift shop in the heart of downtown Austin, TX on the world-famous 6th Street.  We wanted our shop to be different from the ordinary run-of-the-mill tourist shops and convenience stores that were already in the area, and I (being a long-time fan of horror and sci-fi movies) had the idea: wouldn’t it be neat to be the owners of one of those creepy little curiosity shops you see in those late-night B-horror-movies, where perhaps one might actually find, browsing among the dusty shelves, an actual cursed monkey’s paw, or an authentic mummified fiji mermaid, or maybe even a “mogwai” or two. Well, needless to say, my wife (then-girlfriend) Veronica thought that I was out of my mind, but agreed to humor me and let me explore my fantasy of this strange gift shop of oddities. And so was birthed our little store here in Austin, Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts, and the beginning kernel of what would grow into the future Museum of the Weird.  
    It’s kind of funny how we came up with the name “Lucky Lizard” for our shop.  After several hours of brainstorming trying to come up with a catchy name, I remembered something a friend of ours had casually suggested. He knew that I had a couple of lizards as pets, an iguana and a nile monitor. I had mentioned to him I intended on housing them somewhere in the back of the store in a big glass case for our customers to see, and so he suggested why don’t we name the store “6th Street Lizard,” or something along those lines. While I knew it didn’t have quite the ring I was looking for, the idea of adding the word “lizard” to the name stuck in the back of my head. Later in our brainstorming session, Veronica and I were looking for adjectives that would convey a good feeling with our patrons– “joyous”… “happy”… “LUCKY!” That was the one!  As soon as the word popped into my head, it just came out naturally: “Lucky Lizard!” It was perfect. I decided to add “Curios & Gifts” because without it, being situated on 6th Street, I knew people would get confused and think it was a bar. “Yeah, let’s go on down to The Lucky Lizard and have a drink!” So we named the place Lucky Lizard Curios & Gifts, and the rest, as they say, is history. 
    Believe it or not, even with the full name clearly written on our outside sign, people still stumble in time to time thinking we’re a bar. “Hey! Do you guys serve margaritas???”
–Steve Busti, owner of Museum of the Weird

TO BE CONTINUED!
TOMORROW: Part 2 of The Origin of the Museum of the Weird!