Partly Cloudy, 64°
No matter the persistent Providence rainstorms of late, residents of Keeney Quad say spring fever is already here. While a fire alarm that went off late last Saturday night caused firefighters to search through Keeney for signs of smoke, the real sparks seemed to be happening outside where students clad in various states of undress waited patiently to be allowed back inside.
"No effing way," said Jordana Allen '12, a resident of Jameson Hall. "Doesn't Gary Axelrod live on Pembroke? What's he doing in his boxers with Kara Johnson?"
"Yeah, I saw that coming a mile away," said Amanda Furlong '12. "Dude was at her room party in Mead, and they were eye-humping the whole night."
Other students expressed similar surprise at the presence of some couples who were standing in the quad. Many of the couples were holding hands and some even continued to carry out their late-night trysts. "Is that Ellen Wayland making out with Julia Higgins?" said James Wu '12. "Is she lesbian?"
"Like a 4 or 5 on the Kinsey scale, I think," said Furlong.
Longtime Providence firefighter Jim Edmonds, who said the alarm resulted from a microwave malfunction involving Orville Redenbacher popcorn and a bottle of Bacardi 151, argued that the newly discovered couples were relatively unsurprising, at least from his perspective. "I could've called Jenny Leibovitz and John Taylor," he said, "but I guess Erin Rollins and Isaac Klein was kind of unpredictable. Isaac Twittered that they were playing some pong at Sigma Chi, but it didn't seem like it was really in the cards."
While fire alarms are common occurrences on the Brown campus, they rarely indicate an actual fire, Edmonds explained. "We do a thorough search of the dorms, of course, as per safety protocols, but the real excitement comes when we get back outside," Edmonds said. "Who ended up with whom? Who's too drunk to walk back to Minden? Who's too stoned to realize they've forgotten to put down the whip? It's questions like these that drive us onward."
"I've got to disagree with Officer Edmonds, I thought this was a totally eye-opening night," Allen told the Noser. "Now, last Friday, when Scott Mound pulled the fire alarm over in New Dorm, that was a bore. Sure, it was only 7 p.m., but you'd think at least a handful of people were making the ol' beast with two backs."
"What about Molly Simmons and Jake Wynand?" Furlong interjected. "They were definitely there, and Jake looked like he'd just run a marathon."
"I think he did," Allen said. "Like, I'm pretty sure he does run marathons. So he was probably pretty tired. And there's no way in hell he's getting more ass than me."
Though the Providence fire trucks drove away well before night was over, Edmonds said speculation among the firefighters continued well into the morning. "From fire to fire, it gets lonely sometimes, wondering what will happen the next time the students are flushed out of the dorms," he said. "You have to deal with what you have. With Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, of course, you get an idea of what may be possible. But until that alarm goes off, you never really know what you're gonna get."
