The Gates 22 Winter Wonderland PrankA long-standing tradition in Blacker house is the so-called Frosh Challenge. Each year the house's seniors devise an outrageous, seemingly impossible project which they charge the house's fresmen to complete. In past years these projects have tended to require hundreds of hours of work --planning, building, haggling, testing, crying, enjoying-- all to accomplish one incredibly wacky event. One year the frosh turned an old fountain in Millikan Pond into a whale; another year Beckman Auditorium became a carousel, complete with 200-lb hydraulically automated horses. A useless but fun exercise. The tradition actually has a very legitimate, laudable purpose: to promote cohesion and friendship in the shy new freshman class.
My frosh year (`94-95), we were told simply to spontaneously create Christmas in Gates 22, our Chem 1 room. --Mid-lecture, of course, complete with snow and Santa Claus. After weeks of brain-storming and relaxed planning (i.e. procrastinating), we realized that time was running out, so we picked a date --the monday before finals week-- and got to work. We decided that we'd give the class an impressive, bona fide multi-media show: there'd be music, lights, snow, presents, food, and, of course, a cameo appearance by the renowned chem prof Harry Gray, as Santa. All this would spontaneously develop in a carefully orchestrated, deftly performed extravaganza --pleasantly interrupting one of Nate Louis' sleep-inducing --er, scintillating-- lectures. What ambition!
Inspiration requires perspiration, of course. We worked hard, for several days for many, many hours. We found a great source of snow --small bits of styrofoam. The only problem with this sort of snow is that it doesn't exactly fall out of the sky (although in L.A. sometimes I wonder...) To produce this stuff, we had to spend hours scratching away at blocks of syrofoam with keys, fingernails, knives, or whatever else we could find. Nails hammered through a wooden block worked really well, we found --if one didn't mind an occasional scratched hand. Static electricity was not something we initally considered, so the walls and floor of Hell --the alley where we did this work-- turned white with statically-charged styrofoam. Hell, in effect, froze over. The lights (christmas lights strung along and through the room's various nooks and crannies) and music ("I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" and "Here Comes Santa Claus") would be easy, since in the back of Gates 22 there is a projector room, containing the room's light and p.a. system controls. Being the adept mole-frosh that we are (were--now we're bitter S'mores!), we managed to garden our way in. We were ready to wreak havoc...
The hard part, of course, was finding some mechanism to get our boxes of
snow into Gates 22 --and at the exact moment we wanted it. After
investigating each square centimeter of the room and tracing every possible
external access point, we decided on two methods of delivery: (1) blowing it
through pipes in the front and back of the room, and (2) dropping it from
eight small light fixtures in the ceiling.
For the first method, we found pressurized air sources in a small machine room adjacent to the front of the room and in a handy chem lab next to the room's entrance. With this air we pressurized drums full of our snow, and ran pipes and tubes from these drums into Gates 22. The second method was even more elaborate: we outfitted eight small, unused light fixtures with solenoid-latched hinging covers. Once we filled each light cavity with snow, all it took was a flip of a switch to activate the solenoids and release the light covers, dropping all the snow on the room below.
