A (0:00)

This is an I Heart Podcast. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

B (0:17)

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of curiosities.

C (0:40)

In 1982, Martha Stewart published her debut book called Entertaining. It breathed new life into the idea of cocktail hours and themed dinner parties. Martha gave instructions on how to throw elaborate celebrations with friends. She thought of everything too, from the menu to the decor. The book quickly became a bestseller. 43 years later, it sold over a million copies, and people still love the recipes and tricks hidden within its pages. It just goes to show that hosting is an art. Steven understood that when he decided to throw a reception at the college where he worked. Everything had to be perfect because his guests were traveling a long way to attend. But with careful preparation and attention to detail, he was able to throw a party for the ages. In fact, it's still talked about today, and if all went according to plan, it would be remembered for centuries to come. On June 28th of 2009, an event planner hurried around a reception hall at the University of Cambridge. She wanted everything to be perfect for that day's reception, especially considering who was hosting the party. She covered the tables with crisp linens so that the caterers could arrange the appetizers. She blew up balloons to decorate the hall and placed champagne glasses on the nearest table by the door. And then, a finishing touch, a cherry bouquet of flowers at the center of the food table. The room looked perfect at 12pm on the nose, the party's host came into the room. Professor Stephen Hawking, the world famous theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and the director of research at the center for Theoretical Cosmology, so any party he threw was bound to be well attended. And yet the minutes crept by and the reception hall stayed empty. Not one person popped by to say hello. The staff there exchanged looks. Stephen Hawking was a renowned scientist and one of the most respected minds in his field. When he threw a party, people, people showed up. It had been a long road to get there. Hawking began his study of physics at the age of 17 at University College, Oxford. He then went on to earn a PhD in Applied Mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge. But a year into his PhD program, when Hawking was just 21 years old, he was diagnosed with a rare slow moving form of motor neurone disease. It would slowly paralyze him over the course of his life. Soon enough he was bound to a wheelchair. And then he lost his ability to speak and relied on a speech generating computer to be his voice. But while Hawking was physically limited, his mind traversed the cosmos. As a scientist, he made a number of breakthroughs and furthered our understanding of the laws that govern our universe. He wanted a wider audience to understand his findings, so he wrote books that managed to simplify complex scientific ideas so that non scientists like us could better understand time and space. His most popular book, A Brief History of Time, was on the New York Times bestsellers list for an astounding 237 weeks. All of which is to say, he was not the kind of person to throw a dud of a party. But Hawking didn't seem upset. In fact, a small smile crept across his face. He moved around the room, passing time, and finally, after a few hours, he thanked the staff for their work and told them the party had been a great success. The event planner was obviously confused, but told the staff to go ahead and clean up. The next morning, on June 29, Stephen Hawking told his assistant that he had an errand to run. He gestured to a stack of invitations on his desk and said that they needed to be mailed out immediately. They were invitations for the previous night's party. The assistant raised an eyebrow. After all, people usually send out invitations a few weeks before a party, not the day after when nobody could show up. But when she read one of the invitations on Hawking's desk, she suddenly understood and burst out laughing. The invitations read, you are cordially invited to a reception for time travelers. 12:00pm June 28, 2009 no RSVP required. Stephen Hawking had thrown a party for time travelers, but waited to mail out the invitations until the next day. Hawking wanted to prove whether or not time travel was possible. He was confident that at least one copy of his invitation would survive for hundreds or even thousands of years. Surely someone from the future would travel back in time and join him for a glass of bubbly. But nobody showed up, which meant that time travel is either impossible or is never achieved by humans. Of course, there's always a chance that his party invitations got lost or that time traveler simply had no interest in attending his party. So in 2018, when Stephen Hawking passed away, his estate made one last attempt to prove time travel might be real. They allowed anyone with a birthday through December 31, 2038 to register for tickets to his public funeral. That way, if someone from the future wanted to come, they'd be able to register online. What is entertainment worth to the average person? This question existed ever since the first person paid for a poem or commissioned a bard to write a song. It's deeply personal and inextricably linked to our priorities as people living in the world. When we buy a concert or movie ticket, how do we know that we're getting our money's worth? And the further back in history we go, the higher stakes this question becomes, especially since there were far fewer avenues for entertainment. Well, this issue came to a Head in 1809. In London, live theater was extremely popular, and the previous year, the theaters at Covent Garden and Drury Lane burned down. Covent Garden rebuilt and planned to reopen its doors. To the British public, who was eager to get back to the theater, however, there was a sticking point. To recoup the costs of theater repair, Covent Garden theater management increased their ticket prices, so box seats now cost seven shillings rather than six. Seats in the pit were raised from three shillings to four. And worst of all, the third tier of seating was no longer available for individual shows, but rented yearly to the tune of £300, prohibitively expensive for the average member of the British public. And the theater management knew that people wouldn't be happy. In their playbills, they explained the reasoning for the ticket prices. The Reconstruction had cost £150,000, and they were dealing with rent prices that had shot up since the fire. Opening night was Monday, September 18th of 1809. The theater's manager, John Kemble, was scheduled to go up before the show for a brief address about the refurbished auditorium. He was also an actor who was to play the lead role of the play that night. When he stepped out on stage, he was greeted with polite applause from the wealthy patrons in the boxes, and then hissing and jeers overtook the applause. The voices predominantly came from the pit, the floor of the theater, and they continued to loudly protest throughout the performance. Policemen were called in to try and calm them down, but it only made matters worse for show after show, people filled the pit with the intention of disrupting the action on stage. Some banged pots and pans, others shouted loudly or sang songs. A public relations war broke out between the theater management and the supporters of the riots. Posters went up defending the new prices, and the riots continued, no matter how many times they were hauled away and jailed. The series of disruptions became known as the Old Price riots, with participants referring to themselves as ops. Their disruptions were aggressive, loudly criticizing the theater for greed, but very little of the theater itself was damaged in the chaos. The disruption, however, was too much for the managers to handle. In December, John Kemble had the theater closed. While the managing directors looked over the books to make a decision, they settled on returning to the original pricing for the remainder of the season. Kemble issued a public apology and was greeted by a sign in the pits reading simply we are satisfied. Hoping that it would be soon forgotten, Kemble attempted to bring back the idea of private boxes at the start of the following season. When the rioters returned in force, the idea was quickly scrapped. At the center of the old Price riots was class. Live theater, which today is extremely expensive, was an entertainment accessible by all and attempting to cut working class Londoners out of the experience was was seen as offensive. Works by playwrights like Shakespeare shouldn't be restricted to the ruling class. It was a hard learned lesson for the seasoned thespian and businessman like Kimball, but he took it to heart. Although the riots caused little property damage, injuries had been common throughout the months of protest. It is sad to say that in the chaos 20 people died, although historical accounts are fuzzy on how these deaths occurred and who these 20 people had been. But what it shows to us now is that affordable theater was important to them. It was worth fighting for. And the play that opened that fateful season at Covent Garden? Naturally it was a popular one, one that would bring in the crowds. And it was also the most famous cursed play ever written, William Shakespeare's Macbeth.