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Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Sep 15 03: wet people fun
So. What do you get when you cross about a million dollars’ worth of fireworks, a Chinese ‘explosions artist,’ the Central Park 150th Anniversary, four to six minutes’ elapsed time, and, um, a lot of soggy weather?
As it turns out: not much, unless you count a whole lot of soggy, vaguely underwhelmed New Yorkers.
I went with Sari and Jilly B (returned from her Hungarian exile at last) to see “Light Cycle,” a fireworks performance in the Park by Cai Guo-Qiang this evening. We were careful to check the hotline before we went, because the weather here in the City has been unfavorable for outdoor events of late. But the hotline said no no, everything’s going to go off as planned unless there are low clouds or heavy rain. At 6:00, the clouds weren’t so low, and the rain was sprinkly when it fell at all. So off we went. At 7:15, when we entered the park, things were really no different. The show was going to start at 7:45, so we figured we were in the clear. We made our way to the Sheep Meadow and plunked ourselves down on the grass. At 7:30, a few drops fell, but we had umbrellas, and we curled in beneath them, and the sound of the rain pattering on our little nylon shelters was kind of soothing. Several hundred cityfolk sat around and tried not to get too soggy as they waited to see a ‘thousand-foot wheel of flame and light’ appear. (Visions of the Eye of Sauron gazing balefully down upon Midtown danced in my head.) We tried hard to ignore the ceiling of dark clouds rapidly crashing down from on high. A single bat darted in and out of the trees.
At 7:43:30, the rain began to fall. Hard. Undaunted, the first volley of fireworks went off. Bright; brief. Loud. Not bad. And then a moment’s pause. The ‘luminous halos’ stage was next. For a single careless moment, a steady stream of water ran from a vane of my umbrella and straight down the back of my neck. It was cold. A flurry of the same small white rockets went off, pacing out a small circle above our heads.
Wait. Was that the halo? Was…no, wait…
The focus of the fireworks suddenly shifted to somewhere north of us. We could hear dozens of tiny, very expensive explosions thumping back at us from the surrounding apartment buildings. A stand of trees in the middle of the Sheep Meadow’s northern border obscured most of the sights from most of the people, so we were treated to the spectacle of several hundred people with umbrellas dashing to the Eastern side of the lawn, trying to see around it: a swift herd of tall black jellyfish, squishing gently as they passed. Actually, that part was pretty good.
A nondescript volley of white lights started up, and lingered over the Great Lawn for a long minute. Then the low rainclouds went dark again, and stayed dark. Most of the crowd started clogging the muddy gates to the Meadow. A surprising number remained, motionless, staring up above the treetops, waiting for something cool to happen. They held their video cameras at the ready. The rain puddled in their shoes. The park grew quiet.
Jill and Sari and I, meanwhile, went hunting for pizza. When we found it on Columbus Avenue, it was crisp and hot, and not soggy at all.