Papering the House

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tokali.

I’m calling from Coronado in California.

Tokali, what a great name. How do you spell that?

It’s T-O-K-E-L-I, Tokali.

Tokali.

It’s Potawatomi Indian. The original word is Tokwali.

And I believe that Tokwali means I love you in Potawatomi Indian.

Wow, isn’t that sweet? That’s very nice, actually.

Wow, Tokwali.

Yeah.

Well, what’s your question?

But the real deal is that I was born in the 60s, and so I was probably going to be named Moonchild.

Or Star, yeah, or Flower.

Chalice or Saturday or something, yeah.

Sure.

I like Tokali.

Yeah.

I think you lucked out.

Well, did you have a question for us?

I do.

I’m an actress and a singer, and I’ve been a theater director and an educator, and one of the terms that we use in the theater is called papering the house.

Papering the house traditionally means putting industry people in the seats for free on a night when, you know, you have press coming or you have VIPs coming and you don’t want the house to look too empty.

It also helps with the energy of the audience and the people on stage.

I was just wondering the etymology of it.

I understand what it means, but why?

And where does that come from?

This one is pretty straight up.

It goes back more than 100 years.

Papering the house means literally to spread paper, and the paper in this case is tickets.

So they’re giving all of these comp tickets to these people in order to put butts in seats.

Because as you say, even if somebody’s kind of lukewarm, whatever you’re putting on stage, they’re still better.

And still better have a living person there kind of half clapping than nobody clapping at all.

And that kind of shenanigans is kind of what the airlines do these days.

They paper planes.

What they do is it’s better that they should charge somebody $10 a seat instead of $400 if they can’t get $400.

They need to make some kind of money.

So sometimes papering the house is kind of like to build up this false sense of demand.

So you can say, yeah, we had a full house last night, and everyone assumes that those tickets were all paid for.

You know, in New York City, and I think in other towns, they have TKTS booths where papering the house is now kind of done a little differently.

Tickets are heavily discounted the day of the show, perhaps even hours before the curtain goes up, in order, again, to put butts in seats.

Butts in seats are more important than getting your max revenue per ticket.

Right, or pay what you can and the line that goes around the block near Times Square.

So it’s a pretty straightforward answer. Does it make sense?

It sure does. Thank you very much.

Yeah, well, thanks for calling.

Break a leg. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Oh, yeah, break a leg. Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about a bit of jargon from your profession, we’d love to answer a question you have about it.

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