At MIT student BBQ, piano hurled off a dormitory roof
(Evan Richman/Globe Staff)
Pre-flight inspection: Albahar checks out the soon-to-be-flying baby grand.
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff
A cookout this afternoon at an MIT dormitory was typical for students at the science mecca: grilled chicken, veggie burgers, and hot dogs. Fruit punch and lemonade. And a piano was hurled off a seven-story roof onto another piano.
It was the revived annual piano drop at the Baker House, an event that could only take place on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It didn't go as well as we expected," said organizer Abdulaziz Albahar, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering who is president of Baker House. "We expected the pianos to shatter into a lot of different pieces. But the one that we dropped off the roof was really, really, really strong."
Like a true engineer, he figured that you'd have to take the sturdy baby grand up 15 stories to get it to shatter.
To build excitement, the piano drop was preceded by a different stunt. A shopping cart with a large stuffed bear inside came hurtling down.
Finding the pianos was not hard. (The baby grand came from an MIT fraternity, and another came from a donor in the suburbs of Boston.)
Getting permission from the school to drop the baby grand from the roof was another story. (Yes, they had permission.) The students had to submit schematics to officials to show that the prank was safe and get approval from the MIT police, the campus activity office, and the school facilities office. They also had to pay a state trooper to oversee the operation and promise to wear harnesses when they went on the roof to do the deed.
The piano drop tradition started in 1972, but stopped in the late 1990s until it was revived in 2005. Like most MIT pranks, there is no larger point.
Albahar said the piano that was on the ground "definitely shattered" and he had a few fragments of it as souvenirs. The baby grand, he said, would be reused next year.
Was the miraculous piano still playable?
"A little bit. Not too much," he said.
Taking wing: the piano that fell to earth.
(Evan Richman/Globe Staff)
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