It makes perfect sense that a tiny DIY museum would pay tribute to sisters Tish and Snooky Bellomo, the founders of Manic Panic, a brand that made its mark selling wildly colored hair dye 50 years ago in a little shop on St. Marks Place in the East Village and is now a worldwide business that is still run by the women who started it.
The City Reliquary in Brooklyn is where you can see the show that raided the pair’s archives and now displays artifacts ranging from early business cards and flyers to Debbie Harry’s gold platform shoes to a stage prop from their days singing in the Sic F*cks.
Titled “Still Manic After All These Years,” the exhibit could also have easily been called “Still Wonderful After All These Years,” as the duo is just two of the nicest people we know.
Dave Herman, who founded the Reliquary in 2002, notes that his storefront museum, which is almost the smallest one in NYC, “basically tells the story of New York from the local perspective, from the people that have lived it and appreciate the day-to-day life here.”
Building the Manic Panic legacy
It started off filled with items from his own collection and expanded to include “some given to me by my parents and grandparents, some found in estate sales or thrift stores and flea markets and dumpster dives all around the city,” he says.
“The point was that it was a collection of things that might have been discarded but still had the power to tell a significant story about local history,” Herman adds.
Lee Berman, who curated the show, got the idea when he saw an article about Tish and Snooky in the New York Times.
“The amazing thing about this show is I just cold-emailed them,” he recounts. “They responded, they came to do a site visit, and I was ready to do a long pitch. They just took one walk around, we talked for a little bit, and they said, okay, what do we do next? I’d never even ask them if they wanted to do this show. They just were like, ‘Okay, we’re doing this.’”
Luckily, the Bellomo sisters are both collectors and have saved everything they could.
“We collect stuff,” Tish Bellomo confirms. “We have dresses from our babyhood; we have stuff from high school. We are compulsive thrift shoppers. A lot of the stuff in our homes is similar to what’s in the reliquary. So we couldn’t have found a better place to display some of our items.”
Berman, a volunteer at the museum (like most of the staff), couldn’t have had a better time going through their archives.
“It was off the charts!” he exclaims. “They saved everything for the past 50-plus years, whether it was residual checks that they got for being extras on ‘Law and Order’ or a letter from their lawyer from 1982. But the things that really struck me were everyday correspondence. There was a postcard from Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys. A letter from Joey Ramone’s mother. Manic Panic was really a central hangout spot — it was more than just a store.”
Snooky Bellomo notes that although they had a treasure trove to go through, “It was very unorganized. Just piles and piles of, like, archaeological strata that we were going through, and we still haven’t finished! He’s been kind enough to offer to come back and do more because, you know, it’s a lot of stuff. We’re not hoarders; we’re archivists. Only our archives are like a big mess, and, well, it looks like we’re hoarders.”
There is the possibility that more things will be added to the exhibit, which is scheduled to run through March.
Among other things, there’s a tribute to their mom, who named their business all those years ago and “supported us in everything we did,” even going to see their aforementioned band – the one with the name that they were afraid to tell her about.
“But someone else told her,” says Tish Bellomo. “And one day she said, ‘By the way, what’s the name of the band? I forget,’ and we knew that she knew.”
Both Tish and Snooky had a great time at the two opening events: an invite-only one on Friday night, and a public one on Saturday that Herman says was the most people they’ve had in the museum.
Tish Bellomo first thought when she saw the finished installation was, “I couldn’t believe it. It was done so perfectly and it really just screamed 1977!”
“And actually, even before that,” she adds. “I mean, there were pictures of us as children. So it just it was kind of like, this is your life. And, she continued, “ there were people who came who we hadn’t seen in like 30, 40 years and people’s children that we had never met before. It was just wonderful.”
“It was just so surprising to hear how many people whose lives we affected and, you know, we didn’t even know that we did,” Snooky Bellomo recalls. “It was just so nice to hear. I was thinking, oh my god, we should have had somebody just by our side the whole time videoing what everybody was saying because they just said such great things.”
For more information, visit Instagram @cityreliquary and @manicpanicnyc.
