Here's a guide to different kinds of aerial fireworks displays. This may come in handy in case you're watching a display with other people and you want to say something pithier than "Ooooooh!" and "Ahhhhhh!" You can instead announce, "Hey, that's a Spider followed by a Crossette!" Imagine how impressed your friends will be.
Just as I don't have any good childhood memories of Halloween, I don't have a lot about the Fourth of July. I had a fine childhood but not because of holidays. A couple of years there, we traipsed over to a nearby park with a picnic dinner, camped out, ate and waited forever for a rather anemic show that seemed hardly worth the effort. After three or four such outings, there came a year when the conversation about going went like this: "I guess we'll go over and watch the fireworks at the park again this year." "Well, I'll go if you really want to see them." "Well, I'm only going because you want to see them." "I don't want to see them that badly." "Then why are we going?" That kind of conversation.
I also recall a year when my father drove me down to an unincorporated area of Los Angeles to buy some fireworks — mostly just sparklers — for home use.
It's funny. At the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica Boulevards in West L.A., there used to be three or four huge liquor stores. If you didn't know the reason, you'd wonder, "Why the heck are they all there, across the street from each other, competing like that?" If you were opening a liquor store, would you open it right next door to the biggest one in the city? Well, in this case, you might. There was then a law that alcohol could not be sold within a certain distance of the U.C.L.A. campus…because as you know, college kids would rather do without than drive an entire half-mile or whatever it was. That intersection — Westwood and Santa Monica — was just outside the No Booze Zone and there was therefore so much business that it could support three or four large sellers right there. Years later, the law was repealed, drink was readily available closer to campus and all the shops at Westwood and Santa Monica immediately went outta business or relocated. But it was so odd: For years, you couldn't buy so much as one beer a block north of that corner…but you could walk about 35 yards south and purchase an infinite amount of anything alcoholic.
It was like that with the fireworks. The county line ran down the middle of some avenue towards Inglewood, I believe. On one side of the street, selling a firecracker could get you from five to life. On the other side, there were like nineteen places that could sell you enough things with fuses to destroy the entire island of Doctor No. Obviously, their primary clientele was folks who'd take the purchases right back into the area where that stuff couldn't be sold. Otherwise, why would they all be clustered on the border?
We went to one of the nineteen places, bought a few small items…and then the evening of July 4, my friend Randy and I set them off in the backyard as my mother stood there with the garden hose, ready to soak us down immediately if we were suddenly engulfed in flames. It was fun but not a lot.
I was rather indifferent to fireworks until New Year's Eve of 1997 when I stood among thousands of people on the Las Vegas Strip and watched the most incredible display of pyrotechnics you could imagine. I wrote about it here but you don't need to click. Just understand that it was mind-boggling and magnificent and overwhelming and that for the grand finale, they blew up an entire casino. That's right: An entire casino. The display ran six or seven minutes of relentless and beautiful explosions…and at the end, the Hacienda Hotel was imploded as fireworks erupted all over its structure and in practically every window. It was one of those "wow" moments you never forget.
And I suppose it's jaded me forever on the subject of fireworks. Since then, I've seen huge displays at Disneyland, the Hollywood Bowl and a few other places. Everyone around me is enthralled as as they ooh and ahh and remark on the sheer beauty of it all, I just smile gamely and say, "Yeah…it's nice. But I don't see them blowing up an entire hotel!"