Marlon Brando singing “Luck Be A Lady” in rehearsal with “Guys and Dolls” composer Frank Loesser. Fifteen pairs of Liza Minnelli’s false eyelashes. A first edition of “West Side Story” signed by Stephen Sondheim.  Autographed photographs – one by President Franklin Roosevelt “For Ethel Merman,” one by Gertrude Stein for the Broadway  conductor of her  “Four Saints in Three Acts,” one by  Coco Channel for the Broadway producer of the musical “Coco.”

 For which of these would you pay $10,000?

That’s the price of the Coco Chanel photograph – the Gertrude Stein is going for $4,500; FDR, $4,000; Sondheim-signed book, $2,800; the eyelashes, $1,500, the Brando photograph a mere $350. They are for sale by one of the more than fifty exhibitors who are showcasing more than 10,000 items this weekend at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, as part of Ephemera 44. Ephemera 44 is the fair and annual conference organized on behalf of The Ephemera Society of America, which was founded in 1980 as a “fellowship of collectors, scholars, researchers, archivists, and dealers” of ephemera –  defined as items not initially expected to be retained or preserved, but which are now cherished.

It makes sense that there’d be a market for such items connected (directly or indirectly) to the theater, which itself is routinely called an ephemeral art form, and praised for being so: “I like the ephemeral thing about theater,” actress Maggie Smith has said, “every performance is like a ghost; it’s there and then it’s gone.” Playwright Christopher Shinn has said: “When we interact with people most of those interactions are ephemeral and once they’re over, all we have are our memories. Theater replicates this aspect of our life in a very interesting way.”

Below are some of the items by the exhibitor Schubertiade, some of which are captioned with excerpts from the exhibitor’s description. (Click on the encircled “i” to read each clearly.)

The photograph of Brando and Loesser was taken in December 12,1955.