One Lady's Memorabilia is Another Lady's Ephemera

I see a lot of plays.* I am also kind of a packrat. I love paper ephemera. Therefore, it is my default to save all my Playbills/programs for every play I see and put them in a box for Future Reminiscences. I do, in fact, take them out and page through them fondly years later and reminisce, too! I have decided, however, that it is time to acknowledge that not EVERY play I see is worth memorializing in this manner.

So I have developed a method to determine which programs I keep. In a given calendar year, I keep all programs from shows I see in that year. When I get home from a show, I stick my ticket in the program and stash it in a Designated Spot.* Then, the next January, or whenever I see the first show of the next year, I pull out ALL of that year's programs and make the cut. What gets kept gets stored; what gets recycled gets recycled.

These are the shows I saw in 2012. Well, most of them. This is before I made the cut, but after I had misplaced some programs. 

I am now in my second year of using this method and it is working for me for a few reasons. First of all, it is better than storing everything immediately because it creates some built-in reminiscing time about when I saw the shows to reinforce the memories I want to reinforce. And of course it eventually requires less storage space than would storing them all. Besides that, it is also better than making the cut show by show immediately after I see each one because that decision might be one I'd regret later. Seeing all the programs together helps me decide in an informed manner which of the shows counted as the year's best theatrical experiences.

*Many are free; many are heavily, heavily discounted using various memberships.
**It's next to the cookbooks.