Welcome Weirdos of the Press!

Weird Sisters started with a gift shop - buy/ sell/ resale to launch our larger idea. Opening day was July 4, 2019 - our Independence Day.  

The vision was that creative artists and businesses could not only get along but needed each other to survive. And the point at which business and art meets is often in the vintage/ resale market. 

So we started a curated vintage and resale shop - but one that gets weirder the farther in you go. 

Weird Sisters Freak Boutique is located inside the Hidden Underground Experience - a rebranding of the Underground Building created by the late Astoria school librarian, Michael Foster. 

Foster, an artist and art collector, owned the Underground Building and had a dream of creating an indoor hangout space and tiny town representing Astoria, Oregon from the 1890s, complete with a Shanghai cell. 

Over the years there were various small businesses in the space - Fosters' own antique shop, the Wine Cellar and a popular tea spot but it had set mostly empty for many years until Weird Sisters Freak Boutique and Kit's Apothecary opened in 2019. 

Shortly after opening at the end of the first summer in 2019, Weird Sisters opened the Weird Sisters Underground Laboratory (or LAB for short) to provide a unique incubator space for artists and small businesses to test idea with trunk shows and pop up galleries. 

Before the pandemic hit in February of 2020 these events were hosted in the LAB: 

Socrates Cafe Discussion Groups

Weird Sisters Micro-Grant Awards Ceremony

Nyk Stephens Listening Parties 

Pop up Galleries featuring artists and performers: Brenda West, William Brown, Julia Hesse, Kathleen Barber, Stephen Shellabarger. 

And plans were begun for the upcoming Mural grants sponsored by Golden Paints. 

Of course these were all put on hold for over a year (and counting as of this writing in September of 2021). 

Weird Sisters Freak Boutique owner, Sondra Carr, is an immersive installation artist, social practice artist and sculptor/ painter. 

Her son, and oftentimes collaborator, Harper Carr, is a voice over artist and singer. 

Harper would often help out at the shop and while running the register would sing to customers, to their delight. 

Sondra thought "how could this be OK?" which became a sort of Weird Sisters refrain. 

They build the Serenade Station in which Harpser would sing from a menu of songs he knew and charge cutomers for the experience. 

Then the roof started leaking. The landlord couldn't find the leak at first and so again Weird Sisters asked "How could this be OK?" and decided that a leak would be OK in a cave and built the Weird Sisters Grotto - a temporary immersive display that makes you feel like you're really in a cave, in the back of a shop. 

They then decided to move the Serenade Station into the Grotto and build a bar to expand the idea into what is now the Experience Bar - a bar, where you buy experiences. 

Experiences range from experiments with your senses, to experiments with perceptions, all the way to rituals that get you psychologically in touch with aspects of your thinking that are often hidden. 

After experimenting with events in the Weird Sisters LAB, Weird Sisters collaborated with the other shops in the Hidden Underground Experience (at that time, Kit's Apothecary and Floral Haze Vintage) to create the Wonderland Through the Wardrobe event.

Over a dozen local actors played the parts of various fairytale characters and the entire Underground Building was decorated as a winter landscape entered through a wardrobe, a lookingglass and a tunnel through a tree. 

Over 300 people attended this event - it was set to become an anual event before the pandemic hit shortly after the holiday season. 

The Pandemic hit and Weird Sisters was closed for four months, reopening in June of 2020 cautiously. At this, the worst time, the space between the Grotto and the LAB became available for rent. The door from Weird Sisters Grotto goes into what used to be the closet of a counselor's office on the other side of the wall. 

That closet is now the World's Tiniest Disco. AKA the "secret passage" to the Portal. 

Again, creating with questions, Carr asked "What is the funniest way to create a secret passage? 

With lights and music and dancing of course. 

Looking forward to the Post Pandemic landscape, Weird Sisters decided to build a speakeasy on the other side of the World's Tiniest Disco - but not any speakeasy. 

This speakeasy is built by an alien from outerspace, and so it contains unusual things that still give a feeling of a speakeasy but not of this world. 

You go through time AND space to land in a place where the Experiences you encounter at the Experience Bar are intensified - in fact, some orders from the Experience Bar send you into the Portal (and beyond). 

In the Works when the Portal is complete, is a reworking of the LAB - because the pandemic created fears about large gatherings, Weird Sisters has begun to reimagine the space as a smaller, more intimate space for personal experiences with trusted bubbles. 

Stay tuned for the announcement here of the expansion but it's already being hinted about a trip through a bookcase to an enchaged forest, a witches abode, and more creative shenanigans. 

There are events and expansions planned for after things return to somewhat more normal - though as with all businesses, it's hard to predict too far in the future right now. 

But Weird Sisters will continue to be a place where you actually can buy experiences and delight and a sense of well-being, if only for a moment, to recharge your psyche for the adventure that awaits. 

Kosmic Karen is becoming our mascot of sorts and is the alien behind the Portal - she has her own advice column of Facebook now and will soon be a more prominent part of our universe. 

As Weird Sisters expands, we'll be renting costumes, and as soon as we can, also hosting our own events. Rest assured, nothing will be normal - it's right there in the name.