In our cups at Overture

A swivel and sip down memory lane.

You grip the cup of cold beer in your hand. With the other hand, you swivel. You sip. It’s August of 2009. In the heady fog of that Leo season, you are catching The Decemberists on their Hazards Of Love tour at Overture Hall. 

You are, at the same time, living through another moment of cultural import: The introduction of the Overture Center sippy cup. Pinkies up, you uncultured clod!

Alright, so way back when, Madison’s public-then-private-but-publicly-funded downtown arts venue wanted to be able to sell drinks during shows and wedding rentals. Quite reasonably, the leadership at Overture wanted to minimize the risk of people sloshing drinks in the expensive, newly built Overture Hall (just five years old at the time) or the expensively preserved historic Capitol Theater. 

Those of us who went out to a lot of shows or wrote about Madison’s cultural life and/or were chronically online (read: annoying) at the time will never forget the answer to this problem. Overture began selling a sturdy plastic pint cup with a vaguely brownish-goldish swivel lid. For an extra $3, patrons could get their drinks in this cup, then take it into the show rather than just having to finish their drinks in the lobby. Then, you could take the cup home, wash it, and bring it back to the Overture Center for enjoyment at future shows.

Overture Center marketed this contraption as a “souvenir cup.” Once Madison’s waggish, smart-assed show-going public got ahold of it, the terminology was out of Overture’s hands. Everyone looked at this thing and understood the understandable-yet-belittling containment aspect of it. Sippy cup! It was and forever shall be a sippy cup.

“Well I can tell you, ‘sippy cup’ was not the branding we were going for,” says Rob Chappell, who worked as a spokesperson for Overture at the time and is now executive editor at Madison365. But as quickly as it started, the battle over terminology was lost. Chappell recalls Overture staffers were referring to them internally as “grown-up sippy cups” even as they worked externally to make “souvenir cup” stick. I recall Chappell defending the cups in an Overture Center blog post titled something like “No one makes fun of a moneymaker,” but it appears to have vanished from the Overture site in a redesign.

Perhaps the cups did make money, but people could and did make fun of them. Or at least we simply could not stop talking about it. In addition to The Capital Times‘ cup-centered dispatch from that Decemberists show, a cursory search turns up mentions of the sippy cups in an Isthmus review of the same show, a 2013 Cap Times story about Overture’s experiment with an in-house café, a fall 2009 seasonal arts preview in Isthmus, a 2011 Isthmus dispatch from a Ben Folds concert in Overture Hall, a 2010 blog post about a Wilco show… and it wouldn’t surprise me if a whole lot of other sippy-cup chatter from that time has been lost to various forms of internet rot. 

The fixation seems almost quaint in retrospect. This was before Live Nation subsidiary FPC Live shrink-wrapped a bunch of Madison venues together under its control. At the time, some of us clearly thought a rock concert experience in Madison could not get more sterile and overpriced and stilted and weirdly condescending than an Overture Hall show presented by a not-so-megalithic promoter. In an age of cashless venues and usurious fees, the requirement of buying a special cup might not prove so fascinating. Maybe it just gave everyone a good common reason to poke fun at this imposing, shiny institution.

I don’t know exactly when Overture stopped selling the sippy cups. “We do not currently have a branded concessions cup for sale,” confirms Mel Trudeau, Overture’s Director of Events, Health, and Hospitality. Overture spokesperson Sheri Gasper adds: “As Mel said, we no longer offer those cups. But I still have a couple in my kitchen cupboard that I enjoy using!” At some point in the past decade the program disappeared. 

A lot of the cups themselves never left the premises, except maybe in a garbage truck. Lindsay Christians, in addition to extensively covering Madison’s arts community over the years for the Cap Times, served as a volunteer usher at Overture from 2013 to 2018. “As an usher, I gotta say, people usually just left them, or at least many people did,” she recalls. “At concerts, they also left whole, empty bottles of wine that they had smuggled in and we got to clean up. That was cute.”

Katjusa Cisar, Christians’ fellow Cap Times writer at the time Overture introduced these things and author of the first piece linked above, notes that you can still get sippy cups and forget to bring them home at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. “Looking back now, I’m mostly concerned not about the aesthetics but the wastefulness and greenwashing of plastic cup usage, whether intended as reusable or disposable (even compostable plastic is problematic),” Cisar says.

Not all the memories the cups evoke for people are purely, uh, throwaway. Tom Caw, avid show-goer and Music Public Services Librarian at UW-Madison’s Mills Music Library, remembers getting one during a 2014 Steely Dan show at the Capitol Theater. (Caw was also kind enough to send me some photos for this piece, and notes that the Overture Center sippy cups were manufactured by Pennsylvania-based Whirley DrinkWorks.) He attended with composer and UW-Madison music professor Steve Dembski, who died in 2021.

“Steve and I used to talk about Steely Dan when he would come into Mills Music Library, and when he saw they were coming to the Capitol Theater he floated the idea of us going. I laughed at the thought, but he was serious,” Caw recalls. “One day he surprised me by saying he’d gone ahead and bought two tickets, and then I decided it would be an adventure. We were in the last row of the top balcony! We had dinner before the show, and then got drinks as soon as we entered the Overture Center. I recall us laughing about the cups and the lids. We laughed a lot that night. Too much for some other folks in the audience, it seemed, because a woman a couple rows in front of us turned around and shushed us at one point, which only made us laugh even more! At least we didn’t spill our drinks on anyone, thanks to the secure lids!”

Caw continues reminiscing: “I held onto the cup because I guess I thought I might use it again, and I thought my reusable Barrymore plastic cups could use a cupboard companion. I haven’t used it since that night. It says it’s recyclable, but I’m not planning to recycle it now that Steve is dead. It’s taken on a different sort of status as a memento of a night that was a wonderful thing.”

I fondly remember my own Overture Center sippy cup. It got warped in the dishwasher and I eventually had to recycle it. It gave some of us this shared bit that has held up over the years of change in Madison’s cultural landscape. In a strange way, it has perhaps helped us appreciate the parts of our concert-going experiences that aren’t so disposable.