Lummox JR's BYOND blog

I am passionate about fireworks. Every summer I go crazy with anticipation, looking forward to whatever displays I'll be going to see. As a kid I got to walk down the street to an open area with a view of a local speedway's fireworks every 4th of July. In my teenage years, my family went up to Marshfield, MA (near Boston), where you can see bonfires and parties and amateur fireworks all up and down Humarock beach on the night of the 3rd. Several summers during the '90s, a major national group of pyrotechnicians would meet at the fairgrounds in Weedsport to show off their latest and greatest creations, and my family went almost every year they were there. So great is my passion that a little maniacal voice in the back of my head kept nudging me to make the six-hour road trip yesterday just to see the fireworks at Humarock.

Gads I wish I had listened to that voice.

What I had planned instead this year was seeing fireworks at Alliance Bank Stadium, home of the Syracuse Chiefs, where they were going to have fireworks after the ballgame. I've seen postgame fireworks before and they've always been good, so this seemed like a great opportunity to enjoy both. The game was good, a win for the home team in the 12th inning, but that's where things went way south.

I have been disappointed by some fireworks displays in my life, but never until tonight has one actually pissed me off.

What I saw tonight transcended mere disappointment, mere crapitude. This was a display that a real budget was sunk into, and I do mean sunk in every sense of the word because the return on investment was abysmal. I have seen many relatively unimaginative displays that were still incredibly enjoyable to watch. What I have never seen, before tonight, was a failure of imagination on every conceivable level.

Lest this rant continue without substance in exactly the same way as the show I am disparaging, allow me to go into detail. There are several great staples of any fireworks show worth the name:

1. A few really big shells
2. A short time between most shells to appreciate them (except for a few more intense bursts during the show and at the end)
3. Variety
4. The grand finale

In every single aspect of that list, this show was not just a failure but an EPIC FAIL. It's like if you went to see a highly-rated comedian and instead of the show you paid to see, you got a bad stand-in whose entire repertoire consisted of fart jokes that expired before he left grade school. Also he would tell the same joke 20 times in a row each time.

A few really big shells

The standard big firework shell is called a chrysanthemum. In a normal display, you'll see quite a few moderately big mums during the show, and a few really huge ones that burst overhead. Occasionally you'll see a couple go off at once. Mums are the meat and potatoes of any fireworks display. When the finale comes, it mostly consists of lots and lots of mums of varying sizes, and usually a significant number of flashbangs.

Tonight's show featured exactly zero mums. Let me repeat that: Not. One. Single. Chrysanthemum.

In this most basic of elements, the show didn't live up to the standards of even a garden-variety low-budget professional display. And it's not that it simply fell short--it didn't even compete. This display was a marathon runner falling dead at the sound of the starter's pistol. It wasn't a glass two-thirds empty; it wasn't even good enough to be an empty glass; it was a crappy wax paper cup with holes poked in the bottom by a chewed-up pencil that wasn't even sharp enough to write with.

In fact the size of the shells was completely lackluster throughout. Not only was there not a single mum to be seen, but no shell ever aspired to even a simple "sort of big" size. The biggest shells were all, at best, a lukewarm medium. Mind you I have no problem with medium and small shells, but they should be sprinkled among the big and occasionally really huge ones.

Time to appreciate shells / Variety

This is how a normal display is supposed to look: You see a rocket launch. It goes off and you ooh and ahh. During that time maybe another rocket or two launches, or maybe they wait for a moment to raise the anticipation. The next launch comes and you ooh and ahh at the next shell, which is often a different kind or color or something. It doesn't have to be at a slow or boring pace, but even a retarded chimp can grasp the fundamentals of timing enough to make the most of their material.

What we got instead were lots and lots of very similar shells, going off one right after the other, with no regard to artistry or anticipation or presentation whatsoever. And that works just fine if you're talking about a finale, and the shells are of course several orders of magnitude bigger and infinitely more diverse. Seeing the same pansy-sized shell go off a few dozen times in a row leaves you with exactly the feeling you get from a movie where the plot is supposed to start any time now, except it's too late and the end credits are already rolling.

What I've just described is basically a ground display. Pretty much all of the show was one pretty ground display after another. And I mean right after another, no pauses between. No change in tempo, little change in shell type and none at all within a given "set", low-altitude, small-diameter, piddling bursts. And this is good if it's a ground display that happens in between a bunch of real shells, you get to appreciate it for its brief spectacle, and then you get back to the real shells. The real shells never came; it was bland launch after bland launch after bland launch, but far less interesting than how I'm describing it. Yes there was a little bit of difference from set to set, but almost never within the set.

The grand finale

Everyone knows what a good finale looks like. A ton of shells go up at once--though this itself isn't necessarily the cue, since a good show has a few places where they do this. The shells go off and it's several big ones, only while they're going off a few more launches go up, and there's another bunch of bursts. They vary in color and size, and a few flashbangs get thrown in for good measure. The shells increase in pace, size, and altitude until a huge number of them are going off in a row, spread out all over, in an amazing array of colors and a deafening cacophony of booms. Often, but not always, the show will end with a single shell, usually big and usually with some kind of trailing sparks.

Without mums or even a repeat of the flashbangs used to open the show, there was no sign of any finale at all. The utter sameness of the "groundathon" didn't change in intensity or tempo, didn't build up to any crescendo, didn't show any signs of really changing anything much at all in fact. The show never wavered in its lack of luster until suddenly it was over. The whole audience waited with anticipation to see if, now that the parade of ground displays was over, the real show would begin--or at least a real finale. Instead the stadium crew sat as confused as the rest of us for a minute, and finally the lights came up. That was it.

The verdict: GUILTY

Whoever planned that show needs to be fired. From a cannon, into a vat of flaming sewage imported from New Jersey. There is no excuse for a display as bad as that, which surpassed any other I have seen in my entire lifetime--and hopefully any will ever see again--in awfulness. I've been to many shows where I could shrug and say "Eh, it was all right." I've never been to one before that made me mad. Seriously, I want to find the person responsible for this atrocity and punch them right in the neck. With a rock. I don't feel anything less than a neck-punch with a rock would adequately vent the bile I feel towards this miserable excuse for a human being. Also maybe a kick to the groin.

It is completely inexcusable for a show to consist of absolutely nothing but ground displays, and that's exactly what this is. Ground displays are a worthy part of a whole display that can add to its variety, although for my part I can take or leave them. They are not, in any way, a substitute for proper shells and adequate timing thereof. The entire display lasted about 10 minutes; any really excellent display, particularly on the 4th of July, should last around half an hour. This show was more like the leftover dregs after an awesome one-hour display was completely stripped of everything but its ground portions by some busybody safety Nazi.

I paid to see some frelling fireworks on the 4th of July. This outrage is unforgivable. So whoever you are out there who's behind this mess, you'd better start wearing turtlenecks and a jock strap because I AM GOING TO PUNCH YOU IN THE NECK WITH A FREAKING ROCK.

(On a lighter note, if anyone knows of any fireworks shows in the Syracuse area coming up that are being done by actual professionals, or know of a Website where someone might look up such a thing, I would be most grateful. Somehow or other I'm going to have to see a real display.)