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An old black and white photo shows a group of singers in front of a blackboard on which the word Chorallaries is written. The singers are wearing an assortment of garments, including a feather headress, a bandana, and a bowtie. The floor is littered with trash. The heads of some audience members appear in the foreground.

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Yuka Miyake Broderick ’99: “This photo was taken at the Chorallaries’ Bad Taste concert, which was held in 10-250 at midnight sometime in the spring of 1999. I am at the left end of the middle row with the bob haircut. What fun to see a picture from so long ago!

“For this annual concert, we would take our songs and rewrite the lyrics to either make fun of MIT or be a bit bawdy—or both. I'll hold off on writing down some of the song titles given the general (intended) inappropriateness. But we had some really good ones, including a song about struggling through 6.111 set to the music of ‘Galileo’ from the Indigo Girls. (We were invited to sing it to the 6.111 class before they did the last big project of the term for some years thereafter.) You can see all the stuff on the floor there. That’s because the audience would come prepared with toilet paper, beach balls, and other things to throw around. This concert was a highlight of the year for the Chorallaries, and we all really enjoyed ourselves. I think the audiences did, too.

“Being in the Chorallaries was my primary nonacademic activity while I was at MIT, and it was a very memorable part of my time there. It was just fun to spend time and make music with these folks. And I’ve continued to be active in music; I sang in choirs in grad school and later in a community chorus, and I continue today to study piano. I’m an amateur, really, but music has been and will always be an important part of my life.

“My time at MIT was intense because, as we all know, the education is very rigorous. It was also an incredibly fulfilling time of great personal growth. I certainly would not be who and where I am today without it.”

Yuka Miyake Broderick ’99 is vice president, investor relations and strategic finance, at Datadog. She lives in New York City with her husband, Charles R. Broderick III ’99, MEng ’00, and her two children.

Tech Reflection is a Slice of MIT series that tells the first-person stories behind MIT photos. Read more reminiscences of campus life.

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