Credit: Dangerous Minds

Stop your giggling at this headline, because it’s not funny. At all. A man died. Imagine if it were your son, brother, father, friend, who died in this manner, mid-coitus on top of a piano, would you still find it all such a laugh? Of course you would, and it gets even funnier.

Picture the scene. It’s the mid-1960s, and the talk of San Francisco, or at least the side of town that likes to frequent the city’s nascent gentleman’s club scene, is the Condor Club. Their headline act was Carol Doda, one of the most infamous women in the United States, thanks to being the first public topless dancer in the entire country. However, the Condor Club wasn’t content with having Doda’s legendary, 44-inch bust as the big draw of their club; they needed more.

They required extras to put around Doda, to make her entrance as legendary as her assets. So, they constructed the mother of all curtain-jerkers. As the club’s house band would launch into their first song, a piano would descend from the rafters on a hydraulic lift that Doda danced on top of, stopping a show that barely started. The act, as you can imagine, was a massive hit. One as controversial as it was successful, and it was controversial enough to get Doda in legal trouble several times over.

In fact, it was so successful that the show stayed on for the next two decades, Doda herself performing two shows a night until her mid-40s. It’s pretty incredible longevity, but not because Doda was ageing out of the role by then, she was still an absolute smokeshow, don’t be fucking absurd. No, because three years before Doda actually retired from the act, the event that brought us all here happened.

And if you’ve paid attention to the headline, you might be able to see where this is going.

In 1983, the assistant manager of the Condor Club was the spectacularly named Jimmy ‘The Beard’ Ferrozzo. In the early hours of November 23rd, he was alone in the club with his girlfriend, Theresa Hill. The couple got up to what couples get up to when they’re alone, but on top of the piano. However, it went catastrophically wrong when the couple triggered the hydraulic lift mechanism. The piano was raised to the ceiling, and the trapdoor that left space for Doda was closed.

Thus, the couple were crushed against the ceiling. For a sign of how… distracted they were, The San Francisco Chronicle takes special care to mention that the piano took 90 seconds to rise to the ceiling. Forrozzo died of asphyxiation, but thankfully, Hill survived with only mild bruising. Yet the latest that this could have feasibly happened to them was at 6am, and the San Francisco Fire Department only freed Hill from underneath Forrozzo at 10.15am. That’s a minimum of four hours trapped underneath your dead boyfriend. Yikes.

If you feel like I’m being a little blasé about this real person’s death, and let’s be real here, I absolutely am, I’m only being as blasé about it as the club is. The Condor is still open today, and not only do they have a sign on the wall commemorating Forrozzo’s death. Not only do they have a replica of the piano hanging precariously above the entranceway, but you can also order a special cocktail in his memory at the bar. One called, and I’m not making this up, ‘Sex on the Piano‘.

I mean, Forrozzo was in the strip-club industry for 20 years. I can’t imagine he’d have any of this any other way.