Connecticut, I went ‘I think I know what I
want todo.’
“And he said, ‘What?’ I was like ‘I want to
do indoor mini golf.’ And he said, ‘Why?
Why would anybody want to do that?’ I
said, ‘Well, because it’s the exact opposite of
what I was doing. It doesn’t have any
inventory.’ The antique business had all
inventory, and every time you sell it you
have no inventory and you have to get it
again, and itwas insane.
“There’s no inventory to sell, so all I’m
doing is just standing there handing out
putters and I’m making money and people
are coming in and they’re happy. It’s their
entertainment. And the other thing was,
whatever I created, it had to be less
expensive than the movies. We lived in a
town that was very blue-collar, and old mill
town, and none of the people had any
money.”
By the time the drive ended just west of the
Rhode Island line, Monster Mini Golf was
born.
Vitagliano decided the course would be
indoors in her old antique space – which
itself had been housed in an old textile mill
– and she leaned on her husband’s expertise
as a former nightclub manager to
incorporate black lights along with a sound
system that would play music exclusively
from the 1970s and ’80s, which she labeled
as “fun andhappy, partymusic.”
The concept was fleshed out to include
monsters, because, as she said, “monsters are
anything that comes out of your head. If I
was going to make it a NASCAR theme, I’d
have to build cars – and I don’t knowhow to
build cars. But monsters are literally a
creationof the imagination, and that I had.”
She took a bartending job to build funds to
start the business, and went through a
prolonged period of “peanut butter and
Domino’s pizza” meals to avoid siphoning
any money from her husband’s full-time
production company income, because, she
said, “nobody thought itwas a good idea.”
Four months later – on Memorial Day
weekend in 2004 – a golf course with
monsters and glow-in-the-dark wall paint
and neon-colored putters and balls was
open to the public inDanielson, Conn.
“That’s when we were ready, so that’s when
Monster Mini Golf | BusinessWorld-Magazine | 2
