An update. They figured it out, of course.
On one hand, I'm shocked -- shocked! -- at the glorification of such blatant piano abuse.
On the other: Way to go, kid. Think big.
-d.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html------------------------------------
Piano on a Sandbar: Mystery Solved
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
MIAMI — So the now world-famous “piano bar” was not left in Biscayne Bay by the independent filmmakers Billy and Anais Yaeger, who claimed that the feat would be featured in their film trilogy titled “Jesus of Malibu.”
Nor was the grand piano the same one used by the upstart filmmaker James Marcus Haney, a 22-year-old film student at University of Southern California, who shot a music video of an eerily similar piano on a beach in Del Mar, Calif., in September 2007. “Hey,” Mr. Haney said, “stranger things have happened, right?”
No, this stunt was the brainchild of a 16-year-old high school student from Miami Shores named Nicholas Harrington, who figured a video of the old grand piano, which he had set on fire (twice, it turns out), would make a rather, well, inspired college entrance exam essay.
His idea was to shoot a video on the sandbar, about 200 yards off North Miami’s shoreline, with the piano, bagpipes and a submersible belonging to MAST Academy, where Nicholas is a junior.
“We were thinking of a big production, a music video epic,” Nicholas told The Miami Herald, which finally resolved the mystery of the piano-in-the-bay late Wednesday.
The music video epic apparently never happened, however.
The grand piano had actually been a prop in a film four years ago that no one can remember. At a New Year’s Eve party at the Harringtons’ home, the 100 revelers decided to set the piano on fire. It was dropped by davits into a canal next to the Harringtons’ home, and set alight.
The next day, Nicholas, his father, J. Mark Harrington, the production designer for the USA cable channel’s “Burn Notice,” and several others carefully loaded the charred piano onto a 22-foot fishing boat and ferried it out to the sandbar. They rang in the new year by setting the piano on fire again, in the middle of Biscayne Bay.
After the Yaegers took credit for dumping the piano with The Miami New Times Wednesday afternoon, the Harringtons stepped forward and, unlike the others, had video evidence to confirm their account.
But Nicholas’s mother seemed saddened that her son had come forward to spoil everyone’s guessing game. “I loved it being a mystery,” she told The Herald. “The allure was much more powerful than anything else.”
