That’s the Ticket!
After seeing The Lion King at the spectacularly restored Opera House in Boston, I went to the parking garage where I’d put my car because a sign promised a good deal: “Parking: $8 with a theater ticket stub.” But after I’d gone to the cashier, paid the eight bucks, and flashed my ticket stub, he put out his hand. Wait a minute; did he expect me to give him the stub?
“What?” I shrieked. “You mean you have to keep the stub?” He blinked, as if surprised, for what could a stub possibly matter? No one had apparently balked before. “Yeah,” he finally said with an “of course” annoyance in his voice. “If you want the discount, you have to give me the ticket stub. I have to staple it to your parking stub.”
All right, this can’t quite be compared to the choice that Sophie had to make, but I did hesitate. I’ve kept tickets stubs from plays and musicals since I received my first ripped one at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on July 26, 1961: H-19, orchestra left. It’s a green sliver of posterboard that states $4.60 was the admission to see the Wednesday matinee of My Fair Lady. I’ve saved virtually each and every ticket stub since then, though I will admit that occasionally I’ve taken a shirt I’ve just laundered out of the washer and found in the breast pocket a soggy lump of paper that used to be a stub. But I’ll bet that I still have at least 90% of them. One of the best things about my buddy Jay Clark’s sending me a tin of home-baked cookies each Christmas is that after I wolf down the goodies, la-la-la (I’m doin’ it for sugar), I have a tin in which to store that year’s 300-plu stubs.
What I used to do back in my early theatergoing days, when I was exclusively seeing musicals, was adhesive-tape the ticket stubs to the original cast albums. Open up my double-leaf LP of Bye Bye Birdie and you’ll find my red ticket stub from the November 1, 1961 performance, first balcony (as the mezzanine was called then) center F-101 at the Shubert in Boston (my hometown), $4.40. When I started going to Boston tryouts — I Can Get It for You Wholesale was my first — I would keep a stub in my desk drawer until the heavenly day when the show’s cast album came out, and then I would adhesive tape it inside the double-leaf cover. The tape, of course, did not go OVER the ticket stub but was looped and placed UNDER it; I didn’t want to contaminate the precious surface that had all that information on it.
Of course, some original cast LPs were issued with single-jacket covers, in which case I taped the stubs to the back of the albums. Alas, this turned out to be not such a good idea. I still remember my gasp of horror on that day in 1977 when I decided to play Flora, the Red Menace and I saw that the red ticket from the Colonial Theatre tryout was not there anymore! Alas, the tape had dried out to the point where it couldn’t bear the weight of a theater ticket. I pulled out LP albums that alphabetically ranged from Ernest in Love to The Gay Life before I found the little red Flora stub resting like a dead butterfly on the shelf. But even before that happened, I had switched from adhesive tape to rubber cement, which works much better. Just recently, I was checking a fact on my LP cover of 110 in the Shade and there was my blue ticket stub from the June 3, 1964 Wednesday matinee at the Broadhurst: A-6, orchestra, $5.50.
Notice I’ve talked a great deal about colors. Today, there are basically four colors for theater tickets. The Shubert houses have blue tickets, while the Nederlanders use gold and the Jujamcyns grey. Tickets bought at TKTS have a different color scheme, but every ticket has a great deal of white space with unromantic, industrial-styled computer lettering on it. Oh, there was a time when tickets ranged in color from rose-petal pink to sea-bottom blue. That was when Broadway tickets (before the rip) were a graceful 1½ inches wide and 3½ inches tall — though Boston tickets were only 1¼ inches wide. (This, I guess, was a metaphor for the fact that the town’s theatrical activity couldn’t quite measure up to Broadway.)
Today’s big lugs are 2 x 6 inches — and the day is fast approaching when you’ll take home the entire ticket. If you’ve recently been to a Nederlander Theatre, you’ll have noticed that you now hand your ticket not to a ticket-taker but a ticket-scanner. (S)he waves it under a hand-held machine that shines a line of red light on your ticket, which means it is “taken.” It’s only a matter of time before all theaters begin to do this. I’ll need some extra space in my tins to store whole tickets, so I suggest that Jay Clark send me bigger packages of cookies for Christmas. (Maybe he should start acknowledging my birthday, too!)
Some years ago, when I decided that I’d seen enough of a certain picture that graced a 14 x 24 inch frame in my apartment, I decided to replace it with a rubber-cemented collage of ticket stubs. No, not a collage, but an orderly arrangement, organized in rows in the order of the colors in the spectrum: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. So there’s I Never Sang for My Father (red), A Way of Life (orange), Hair (yellow — or should I say blonde?), Lenny (green), Lovers (blue), Stages — a play that lasted one night (indigo), and The November People — another play that lasted one night (purple).
Some of my older ticket stubs have perfect-circle holes in them. That’s how the management indicated that a ticket was free. Now, the word “comp” simply shows up. But punched holes did the trick back then, and they spurred a theatrical idiom. Way back when, these tickets were called “Annie Oakleys” because that hole resembled the result of someone who’d been quick on the trigger with targets not much bigger than theater tickets.
Do you save your ticket stubs, too? I won’t be surprised if you say yes. A few weeks ago, I met Martin Geiger, one of my readers, for dinner. He brought out an envelope, opened it, and showered the table with an array of stubs from way back when. Given that most didn’t have the name of the show but did have the date and the theater, we guessed at what shows they were for and reminisched about those shows. A good time was had by both.
Anyway, what did I do at the Boston parking garage? Did I hand over my ticket to the clerk to save a few bucks and sell my theatrical soul to capitalists, or did I decide that forking over the extra tariff was a small price to pay in order to keep this souvenir? Care to guess?
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
