A travesty occurred late Thursday night when a Nassoons performance in New York City was accidently scheduled in the Holland Tunnel. The error seems to have occurred when a request to have the Nasoons perform in the in “the largest arch in New York City” was misinterpreted by city officials.
The Nassoons originally suspected that something had gone wrong in the planning when the van driving them into the city parked next to the tollbooth at the tunnel entrance.
“We thought that it was some kind of practical joke,” said a sophomore ‘soon. “We all expected the van to start again and take us to a real venue like Carnegie Hall or at the very least the subway station at Times Square.”
Despite the setback, the Nassoons remained upbeat and attempted to perform by standing on the walkways along the edge of the tunnel and screaming over the noise of traffic. Only one song into the set, however, things began to go wrong, as due to some ill-timed honking the harmonies began to fail and a senior baritone completely missed his humming solo.
Two songs later, traffic began to slow and it seemed as though the performance might turn into a success. Minutes later, however, the accident on the other side of the tunnel cleared, traffic resumed its normal pace, and people in cars continued to pass by seemingly oblivious to the performance going on around them.
One song later, in the middle of a stirring rendition of “Princeton is Free,” a senior vocalist broke down and screamed the words “Listen to us” and “Why doesn’t anyone appreciate the brilliance of this song?” repeatedly before collapsing in a heap. Shortly after, the group decided to end the performance early and slowly began to file out of the tunnel.
Back on campus, a cappella aficionados have already begun to analyze the historical importance of the event. According to the junior librarian in the Department of Instrumentless Music, perhaps the biggest a cappella fan on campus, the tunnel disaster ranks at second all time on the list of major Princeton a cappella debacles, ahead of the Footnotes collaboration with Slipknot, yet well behind the Tigerlillies catastrophic tour of Tehran in 1979.
