Replacing the GSU Piano With the Moving One From Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles”

By: Bridget Fekety

I have a question. Why walk a thousand miles when Vanessa Carlton’s self-moving piano can take you down the street? 

Okay, so hear me out: I don’t condone theft – unless it’s for the greater good. And the GSU piano needs some love. Or at least some minute hate. The GSU piano looks like the weird kid next door; she’s cute and popular, but also kinda out of tune, if you know what I’m saying? Who am I kidding–that bitch is CRAZY! Not to mention she is run through. Any hoity-toity hooligan can just walk up and finger her keys whenever they want, which is by no means a fault: she eats!

Anyways, I was thinking and – what more could my girl (I’m at the GSU every day getting Starbucks, this piano and I are girlies) need than a nice vacation? Only for that to happen, I’d need to find her a stand-in, and what better replacement for the wonderfully charming GSU piano than a legitimately sentient one? Yes, I’m talking about the one from Vanessa Carlton’s hit music video “A Thousand Miles”.

Now, like I said, just hear me out. Vanessa Carlton does NOT need a sentient piano and it would be for the benefit of humanity to minimize her power. She is a platinum artist with enough influence to have her music video memed for centuries; she doesn’t need transportation via sentient piano, and she can settle for private jets like Taylor Swift. 

With that established, of course, I snatched her fucking piano. It was harder than I thought, though. Vanessa didn’t pose much of an issue, especially since she’s basically been irrelevant since 2002, but the piano was a tricky one to handle. I had to lure it out of the shadows with sheets of only Rachmaninoff’s finest piano pieces before I could trap it in the U-Haul. 

Anyways, after that, the task was fairly simple. I realized when I got to the GSU with the sentient piano (after waiting AN HOUR in Boston traffic) that I really should’ve gotten rid of the GSU piano before acquiring its replacement. There was a student singing a beautiful ballad and playing mindlessly away on her gentle off-white keys.

This child did not pose much of an issue. 

After uprooting the kid and punting him across the BU beach (this was a field trip for a worthy cause) I returned to the GSU to find the piano empty. Eureka! I promptly rolled her out the doors and sent her rolling into traffic. Of course, I stayed and watched until she safely got onto the T and I stuck a crisp $20 under one of her keys so she could get herself a silly little treat. 

I was just about to get teary-eyed when I remembered there was, indeed, a sentient piano waiting in my U-Haul. 

After releasing the GSU piano, the transfer was seamless. Granted the sentient piano did try to resist at some points, but I used my brute strength to wedge it into place and before I knew it, students were lining up to sit down and play. Interestingly enough, the piano only knows how to play “A Thousand Miles,” but people didn’t seem to mind much, oh no. 

When they went flying down Comm Ave on that sentient instrument-mobile, there was nothing more than joy–or maybe horror–which flashed across their faces. Most people weren’t even playing the piano and simply held on for dear life as the sentient instrument weaved in and out of traffic hazardously, but that didn’t stop “A Thousand Miles” from playing loud and proud!

It seemed like the piano missed this sort of action–this sort of freedom that Vanessa had granted it. Finding the piano around Boston after it ran off with multiple students proved tedious at first, but as soon as I dragged it back to the GSU and another student began their musical adventure, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied.

This experience has, truly, been a monumental one. And–in fact–it made me think of another question to ask:

“If I could fall into the sky, do you think time would pass us by?”