OF FIREWORKS AND FLOWERS AND MY SHORT FUSE

A well-designed fireworks display can be a thing of beauty. No matter its scale – whether vast as Boston over both banks of the Charles River – or small-scale like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around its old mill pond or Needham, Massachusetts, assembled on the long lawn of its high school, the intelligent use of an imaginative palette and the use of the sky as a canvas canopy reaching from the ground to its zenith can turn into a piece of breathtaking performance art, a combination of fleeting painting and wordless theater.

What too often turns up, unfortunately, is largely senseless bang-bang-bang without any subtlety of timing and proportion. Think of a standup comic who can’t tell a joke. No pauses, no phrasing.

In contrast, I think instead of the revelation of a single burst of color – perhaps a small tulip, in the terminology of pyrotechnics – followed in the same spot in the sky by another and then another. In the process, the shots run through the color wheel like slivers of rainbow. And then it’s repeated, with two identical bursts side by side – red turning to orange turning to yellow turning to green turning to blue turning to purple. Simple, elegant, commanding.

Do that right and you’ve announced that what follows will be amazing. You’ll lead the eyes all over the sky – up and up, out, back down, just over the crowd, and back up again. Small that expands beyond the ability to take it all in — or the opposite, leading your eyes to a vanishing point. You’ll create movements the way a symphony or sonata does – each one distinct yet playing off the one before. (Well, Boston’s was traditionally designed to fit music – each section, a song or overture or dance. Now that’s impressive! Oh, and we’d listen along with our radios — everywhere, tuned to the classical station.)

Think, too, that many of the traditional fireworks are named for flowers – blooms that open and then fade, often into another. Hyacinths to chrysanthemums to … well, to see how it works the other way, try this link to flowers arranged to look like fireworks by Sarah Illenburger. Pretty amazing. I appreciate her illustration of how fireworks don’t have to be gaudy greens, reds, and yellows. The more sophisticated designers blend colors into dark brooding as well as shimmering pastels. One memorable show consisted largely of silvers and golds. What was I saying about imaginative design?

A pyrotechnics show works in another dimension as well – it’s a time of public gathering and celebration. Apart from whatever’s happening on your blanket in the dark, there’s nothing private about it. (And we’ll assume you’re jammed in with others.) You can’t do it in your house, at least safely. So it’s a time of community spirit. Even pride. And in the United States, that means the Fourth of July. (The northern half of the country’s just too cold during much of the year to assemble outdoors at night, so this one comes at a perfect time of summer. Not that we don’t try.)

For Dover, where I live, though, the event points up one of the geographic shortcomings of my city. We just don’t have the right spot to mount the event, much less to design it to do much more than the old bang-bang-bang honky-tonk.

Some years, it’s launched from the top of Garrison Hill, where the shots can be seen from much of the city – if trees, houses, or other obstacles don’t block your view from below. Some years, it’s at the high school, but that’s not centrally located. Since few people can walk there, that creates a traffic problem and erodes much of a small-town feeling befitting its scale. Dover’s not an unfocused suburb the way this site suggests.

Downtown along the river would be ideal, if there were only a proper spot. The riverfront park is narrow, though, and too near the old mills, the nearest one once the scene of a disastrous fire. One possibility a little downstream is a gravel-strewn lot awaiting development, but it has little easy access. One elementary school that might do is in a residential area that would not welcome a crowd.

So here we are. If I watch the show, I’ll just get angry, knowing what could be done with the resources in the right setting. As I was saying about the single tulip? It needs the right setting to be appreciated.