On the third and fourth nights of the program, the Jones Hall fire alarm went off and forced cherubs to exit the building.
The first night was planned. The second night was not. Foreshadowing alert: It’s a tale of ramen gone wrong.
Both nights, students were in the middle of showering, watching movies or cooking when the alarms sounded. Iris Mrosovsky of New York was midway through “M3GAN” in the Great Room.
“We’re all wearing flip-flops and pajamas, and the fire alarm goes off,” Mrosovsky said. “So we had to pause ‘M3GAN,’ run outside, and then we were standing outside for like 10 minutes.”
Lucia Longstreet-Lipson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was in the shower when the fire alarm went off the second time. She said once she realized it was a real fire alarm, she started to stress out.
“I didn’t really have time to properly think out what I was gonna do,” she said. “So I put a shirt on, and I still had my towel on. Then I ran downstairs in my flip-flops.”
Because of the earlier drill, some cherubs doubted the second night’s alarm was an actual emergency. Stella Cardoso of Miami was in a Jones lounge with her friends when they heard it.
“I was like, ‘This is definitely a drill,’” Cardoso said. “But then people were telling me, ‘No, there’s actually like a lot of smoke.’”
Cherubs gathered with their instructor groups outside Jones, so Cardoso joined Sophie Lee of Daegu, South Korea.
There, Lee confessed to her group that she accidentally set off the alarm. She had plugged in a portable pot to cook a pack of Buldak ramen. After a failed first attempt to get it hot enough, she placed the pot on the fourth floor’s kitchen stove so the water would boil faster.
For Lee, the plan was perfect. But unbeknownst to her, the pot had a rubber bottom that wasn’t meant to be placed on a stovetop.
“I went back to my room because I knew it would take some time to boil,” Lee said. “But all of a sudden I hear someone screaming and yelling, ‘Oh my gosh! Someone’s pot is melting!’’’
At first, a staff member reassured Lee, hinting that she wouldn’t be punished since it was an honest mistake. Yet, when she walked back into the Jones lobby post-alarm, she spotted a CAA adding her name to the Spit List.
