CS Lounge Folk: Help me remember this story? April Fools 1998...

[dr4b]

This isn't an April Fool's post, but rather a plea to help me remember one.
Basically, I retold the story about Mark Stehlik and playing the Imperial March on IBC bottles today... except I realized later, I had a lot of details to it and I'm not actually positive that ALL of them are part of this same story, even though they all certainly happened... so can someone (I'm especially looking at dvarin and buoren here) help me remember which of these are true?

As I remember it, the definitely true part is that Carl and Kevin and I had a huge surplus of IBC bottles, and Carl filled and tuned them to effectively two scales of music, and hid them in the lounge, then set them up on the ping-pong table at the right time. We also had two 2-liters for "bass" notes. Kevin "arranged" the Imperial March, effectively, for "three people to play by blowing across the tops of IBC bottles".

And we definitely somehow arranged for Mark to come into the lounge on his way through Wean so we could perform it (as a surprise, of course), though now that I'm thinking, I'm not sure exactly when or how. It might have been mid-afternoon?

I seem to recall he was wearing a kilt at the time because he'd been voted to do that by the "put a dollar in the bottle for the professor you want to see wearing a kilt on April Fool's Day" vote... but I also remember him doing that when we showed Braveheart as the SCS movie. So were those the same day, or am I forgetting? I know The Last Starfighter was the SCS movie in Spring 1999, so Braveheart MIGHT have actually been 1998...

Anyway, for those of you who were there -- what do you remember?

And isn't it nuts that it was ELEVEN YEARS AGO? Jeeeez. I still maintain that in many ways, Spring 1998 was probably the best time of my entire life.

Comments

[rehana.livejournal.com]

I thought Carl arranged the Imperial March. Marcin Krieger played bass. Mark was wearing a kilt, but I don't remember why.

[dr4b]

Oh, it was KRIEGER. For whatever reason I was thinking, "was it Mike Haefele?" but I knew instinctively it wasn't -- just couldn't remember who it WAS.

I dunno, Kevin was more of the crazy MIDI file guy at that time. I thought Carl just arranged and tuned the bottles...

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

Cool story! I don't think I heard it before now.

That was definitely a better time in my life too :-/ .

[rehana.livejournal.com]

It's possible. Oh, and I think the big ones were wine bottles or something--glass, not plastic.

[zml.livejournal.com]

Was it afternoon? The easiest time to p0wn Mark was in the morning when he refilled the soda machine (ala the mock orgy morning).

[buoren.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that Carl, Deanna, and I played it. I had done the arrangement. In figuring out what notes to have I distinctly remember some bottles having to be repeated so that the people wouldn't have to share bottles.


Oh, and we did rehearse it too, the day before. We had tuned it then, and left the bottles underneath the table, only to find in the morning they'd gone out of tune due to evaporation.




But yeah, it was definitely orgy morning, and we managed to get Mark to come in in the afternoon.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

It was definitely Marcin Krieger playing the bass ones, but otherwise this sounds right. Or perhaps Deanna played once and Marcin played as a substitute the actual time? His participation had definitely not been planned ahead of time. Hm, I think I remember emergency retuning as well, and that I was trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to use an electromic tuner.

Most of the bass bottles we actually scrounged from the recycling bins in Morewood, because apparently people there really liked drinking wine and vodka and such.

The Braveheart kilt-wearing was, I think, a different day?

[buoren.livejournal.com]

I seem to vaguely remember actually writing down the arrangement... perhaps Marcin was the only other one in the room that could read music?

[dr4b]

no, I definitely played in the ACTUAL playing for Mark. I think Marcin did the bass ones, it made it easier or something? like rather than having someone run over to blow the big bottles?

right, that's what I can't place, is whether this was Braveheart day. I was pretty sure he was wearing a kilt, though.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

You did. You had a computer print-out of it too.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Oh, hm, it might have been that Kevin's original three-part split proved impractical and we had to have three people on the top two parts and recruit for the bottom part, which was all straight downbeats. I definitely remember that what I was playing was pretty much all weird offbeat notes that the switches were too fast to have one person playing them and the other notes too.