Domino display draws attention to Penn museum

No tiptoeing Saturday-evening spiders had disturbed the dominoes, no rumbling trucks passing in the dark.

"Nothing overnight," Steve Perrucci said. "The mice were kind, the spiders."

But early Sunday afternoon, a 2-year-old boy dropped a ball no bigger than a cough drop and knocked over a short line of Perrucci's dominoes.

Quickly repaired, the line was made upright.

And so at 3 p.m. Sunday, about 100 folks clustered around a maze of, yes, 10,000 dominoes on the third-floor rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

And with a nudge of one domino, a maze of them slowly disintegrated over four minutes as domino fell against domino, pattern after pattern gloriously destroyed.

Oohs and ahhs came from children and adults alike.

The maze was part of a one-day event to attract visitors to the museum's many cultural displays.

The Perrucci brothers from Bucks County - Mike, 33, and Steve, 30 - were staging their first Philadelphia event, their first invitation to play with all of their 10,000 pieces outside annual visits since 2008 to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont.

The lines of dominoes didn't just zig and zag. They formed a Phillies logo and a Flyers logo and a chess pawn and lots more.

And they rose on a four-foot spiral to knock off a large die to end the show.

It had taken the brothers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday to set them all up.

The accident with the ball, Steve Perrucci said, was also a first.

Rob Cox, 47, of Wenonah, had brought along his 2-year-old, Jackson Smith, who made the event even more memorable.

The child was holding a bag of tiny game balls, Cox said. "One bounded out and my life flashed before my eyes. I could envision the whole thing going down."

But the Perruccis leave gaps in the lines of dominos to guard against catastrophes. The gap worked.

This was the museum's one event in the university's much larger September-to-September Year of Games.

Museum spokeswoman Pam Kosty said that each year, Penn focuses "on something that will bring the students together. And this year, it's games."

(The next event open to the public will be a tournament of the North American Scrabble Players Association in Houston Hall on Dec. 4.)

The Perruccis' most recent event, with only (only?) about 4,000 pieces, was in September 2010 at the Pearl S. Buck House near Doylestown.

The events near and far, usually only twice a year, do not help buy the groceries. "It's a fun hobby," Mike Perrucci said, "that kind of got out of control."

Steve Perrucci is a construction worker from Quakertown, and his brother is an unemployed graphics designer from Sellersville.

And when you use 10,000, you don't do store-bought.

For their first Brattleboro show in 2008, they cut their own pieces. They used medium density fiberboard for smaller pieces, Mike Perrucci said, to make them sturdier. The larger pieces were cut from plywood.

He said they came to public attention after they set up a website in 1993 and posted their videos on YouTube.

The comedy team of Penn and Teller hired them to do the title of their show with dominoes. "Just one episode, on conspiracy theories," Mike Perrucci said.

Some folks in Vermont saw it, and the Perruccis were off on their occasionally exhausting hobby.

A February show planned for the Brattleboro Museum will be the brothers' next display of their 10,000-piece fantasy land.

To watch the tiles tumble at Penn, turn your browser to www.philly.com/dominoEndText