Yet Another Journal

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» Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Ye Yearly Fireworks Rant
CBS is crawling so slowly back to the halcyon days of WCVB/A&E coverage that we might get a decent Boston Pops coverage in about 100 years (if that soon). They continue to concentrate more time on the fireworks and less on the crowds—since the crowd is there to watch fireworks and not other people in the crowd, why in Sam Hill does CBS think their viewers would be interested in watching the crowd???—but it's annoying the way they have made the Boston Pops change their program (it used to be all the artists and patriotic songs and readings at the "front," then the "1812 Overture" followed by the fireworks; now the so-called "stars" get to perform again after the "Overture" because CBS chooses to broadcast only the final hour of the concert).

This year we folks in the Atlanta area got cheated out of a good deal of the fireworks because the local CBS station always broadcasts the annual fireworks show from Lenox Mall. It's one of those times where I wish we got a dedicated network feed instead of the local channels that Dish has to provide because of the local advertisers whining about loss of revenue. The Lenox show has music nicely choreographed to the fireworks, but that's about it: their fireworks are strictly ho-hum, just the normal red, green, gold, silver, and some blue chrysanthemum and willow aerial bombs that have been playing for the last 100 years. Yawn. Boring. They don't even have some of the fireworks I remember from the church feasts when I was a kid, like the little golden ones that let out a "sqeeeeeee" as they circled. And no one ever does the final "bang!" at the end that always signified the show was over.

The Boston fireworks, on the other hand, were truly a work of art. Along with the new ones that have appeared in the past few years—ones that look like Saturn, or rings around stars, or cube shapes or star shapes—they had several designs premiere this year. One looked like a jellyfish with a big mushroom cap of color at the top and little gold sparkle "feet." There were others that were big umbrella-type circular shapes that looked like the flowers of Queen Anne's Lace (wild carrot), but multicolor—these looked like little jewels and were stunning! The color saturation was also intense on all the different fireworks; at one point it looked like the Charles was on fire. Then the color shifted to an intense blue like that of cobalt glass. It was amazing.

I also hate that they do not identify the pieces of music that play with the fireworks anymore. I could not place the music that played right before Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" near the end; I know it was from a movie soundtrack, but I couldn't remember which.

Pity the coverage wasn't as sterling as the fireworks themselves!