She tells me how she grew up driving old Volkswagens, just like me. She’s like this real life Annie Potts in “Pretty in Pink” to so many of us young folk looking for someone to tell them it’s OK to be weird, better even. She’s this ubiquitous and endless source of cool.
She was born Mignonne Jeannette Reilly on July 17, 1966 at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, to parents Larry and Rogette. She was raised in Trenton, New Jersey, and moved to St. Petersburg as a teenager to attend St. Pete High School. She got her cosmetology degree at the now-defunct Tomlinson Adult Education Center, which was sold to developers in 2021. Her big heart stopped beating on Feb. 6 after complications from cancer, she was 57.
The story goes that she opened Star Booty in 1996, in what she dubbed the Doom District (aka the Dome) on Central Avenue and 11th Street. Soon, Star Booty moved to Central, right across from Daddy Kool Records. And then this thing started happening between the record store, State Theater, Star Booty, Emerald Bar and Fubar. A scene emerged.
“She was the hub of the scene,” longtime friend Kim Dicce told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Everyone knew they could go and see her.”
Mimi and her Star Booty Xmas parties were such a force to be reckoned with, it’s believed that Emerald Bar began opening at night in response to the crowd.
In 2006, Bust magazine did a feature on St. Petersburg, including Star Booty.
“In this thrifty punk-rock-clothing/various-other-stuff shop, you can grab a haircut in the makeshift salon in the back. With your freshly mohawked do, you’ll fit right in on this part of Central,” the article said. A photo of the shop window features the caption, “let Star Booty make you a cutie.”
St. Pete Indie Market founder Rosey Williams would eventually move her Ramblin’ Rose vintage shop into the salon. Print St. Pete founder Kaitlin Crockett sold her Omadarlin printed wares there. Local designers like House of Merch could be shopped within her confines, plus local artists often sold original pieces right from the salon walls.
The first time I saw folk duo Avery and Hunter Moore play was seated on the salon floor during Antiwarpt tour on a hot July night in 2011 (Avery would go on to co-found St. Pete rock band Broom Closet). We all left with hair clippings on our clothes.
“She brought so many different groups of people together,” Dicce added. “There’s so many people that wouldn’t know each other if it wasn’t for her.”
When we talk, during my hair cut or someone else’s, it’s often about what was going wrong in the city.
“Listen to this bullshit,” she’d say, recounting some horrifying decision by city leadership to support developers instead of small business owners and workers. “These motherfuckers.”
A few years back, Mimi organized some folks to fight back when the city was looking to approve a Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of 9th Street, and First Avenue N. The project failed under so much public backlash.
When she wasn’t at the salon, Mimi was often working the merch table at shows that came through Jannus Landing and State.
She loved live music, her favorite band being X (second favorite being R.E.M.), fronted by Exene Cervenka who grew up in St. Pete, too. Lifelong New York friend Delissa Santos told CL about a message Mimi left on her answering machine when X decided to crash with Mimi after a show at State.
“She calls me and is like holy shit, Exene is going to spend the night in the bed,” Santos said. “She was like, I’m never gonna change the sheets ever again.”
Photo via Star Booty/Facebook
John Doe from X gets a haircut from Mimi Reilly
Santos met Mimi when they were both 19 years old and Mimi was living with her pops in Trenton, New Jersey. Mimi was working in the juniors department at Macy’s back then and going to shows at Trenton’s legendary City Gardens punk venue in her downtime. Santos was in a band with Mimi’s boyfriend at the time and they hit it off talking about music. Through boyfriends, breakups, cross-country moves, and all that life brings, they stayed in touch.
“We just stayed friends through everything,” Santos told CL. “We tried to meet up at least once a year up here in New York or down in St. Pete.”
Santos recalled when Mimi started cutting her hair, just at people’s houses, before she opened Star Booty. Mimi had an idea to open her own salon when she came back to Florida, as her own combination of the East Village’s Trash and Vaudeville vintage store with a punk rock salon nearby called Astor Place.
“They cut hair but they sold a lot of cool shit, it was before Hot Topic,” Ricky Seelbach, longtime friend and musician, told CL. “She used to sell the TUK boots, Monkey Boots, you could get studded belts, you get all your gear there that you couldn’t find anywhere else.”
Over 18 years, Star Booty moved again and again, as rents rose and forced her and others like Daddy Kool Records, off the very block they helped to make cool. She does it flawlessly each time, with the final move putting her in own building on 16th Street S.
“Mimi had this relatable energy,” Manny “Kool” Matalon wrote on Facebook after Mimi’s passing. “You fit in, you belonged, and you had a confidant in her.”
Without a landlord, Star Booty was set to flourish into a space big enough for her imagination. Santos said she was talking about turning part of the space into an art gallery someday.
“She was a perpetuator of the underground scene,” Santos said.
Mimi and her longtime partner, Eddie Meade, celebrated 16 years together before she passed away. She was “the Coug” to Eddie’s life as a touring “Roadie.” When he was home, they were together. She traveled around the world to see him with bands like Steel Panther and Sevendust.
She looked out for her own, building an accessory dwelling unit for her mother Rogette to live in. She visited her pops Larry in Trenton, coming home with stories and patches from swap shop meetups. Despite getting sick, despite the cancer coming back when no one thought it would, Dicce says that it never slowed her down.
“Mimi was such a fighter. She had cancer twice, she had all these strokes. And she just kept going. She’d be going out like right after chemo,” Dicce said. “She didn’t want to waste any time.”
The fleeting moments when St. Pete feels very much its own, cool and gritty and strange. That’s Mimi. Her spirit infused itself into the very blood and bone of this city. More than perhaps people like the Mayor, it was people like Mimi that made St. Pete the place we wanted to be.
A benefit and celebration of Mimi’s life is planned for Saturday, March 30, at the Factory, starting at 3 p.m.
Two stages will alternate with live music throughout the night including: Adam Turkel & Billy Summer, Spanish Needles, the Inhalers, Flag Burner, Tiger 54, Mosquito Teeth, ATL DOG, Merzky beat, VD, Star of Khorala, and Human Error. Print St. Pete’s Kaitlin Crockett has a dedicated Mimi zine set to debut at the memorial. It’s free to attend and all ages welcome. Donations are being collected to benefit Mimi’s Star Booty Rock-n-Roll Salon, where bills are piling up in her absence and repairs are needed.
“The city needs closure,” Lauren Gentry, longtime friend of Mimi’s and organizer of the memorial service, told CL. “She was larger than life.”
Gentry noted that Mimi’s mother, Rogette, asked that anyone who wants to send flowers for Mimi go ahead and donate to St. Pete’s Pet Pal Animal Shelter instead.
The fact is that so many people claim Mimi as their own that this tribute could continue endlessly for years. And I will never be able to encompass all that she was and did for this place we call home. That should be a testament to the kind of life she lived and the way we all ought to be. Be more like Mimi.
Illustrations by Alli Arnold / Layout by Jack Spatafora
The March 28, 2024 cover of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
