I save ticket stubs. I use them as bookmarks and when I finish reading the book, if it is my own, I leave the ticket in the book. So years later I open an old book and find, as I did recently, a ticket stub for the four-hour Nicholas Nickleby that I saw in New York in 1981. It starred Richard Rees and Edward Petherbridge was in it. I have wonderful memories of going to dinner during the lengthy intermission with my friends Leslie Davis and Stan Kottock.
Recently while reading Hazel Holt's Mrs Malory: Detective in Residence I discovered I'm not the only one who does this sort of thing:
I always seem to accumulate an enormous amount of odds and ends, even in a short time, and I'm also an absolute fool about throwing things away. Silly things, like a paper napkin printed with the name and logo of the Blue Diner, for instance, or my name tag from a special seminar. [My son] might be interested to see them, I tell myself, knowing full well that he won't. No, it's just that I can't bear to shed any bit of my life. I've got museum ticket stubs from all over the world; they fall out of books and send me into time-wasting fits of nostalgia and reverie.
Something tells me that is the author speaking.
Recently I came across the NicholasI Nickleby ticket stub and some ticket to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, ticket stubs from a Washington Opera performance of The Pearl Fishers and a stub from the Pasadena Playhouse performance of Strike Up the Band! I wonder what else is out there in the books I have in storage.
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