Reflections & Observations

 Where has all the fun gone?

Sunday night, at about 9 p.m., we headed down the California incline. It was probably a pavlovian thing.
   Once upon a time, not all that long ago, at 9 p.m. on the Fourth of July, we were inevitably on the beach or the pier or, sometimes, on the top floor of the Shangri La hotel waiting for the fireworks to begin. There and then, the best and only place in the world to be was at the fireworks in Santa Monica.
   Those fireworks rushing up and up and arcing out over the ocean and bursting and popping and booming and filling the night sky with explosions and swirls and streaks and pirouettes of lights and colors and dazzle were simply the most miraculous, joyful, thrilling sight in the world. No matter how many times you saw them. There and then, people came to the beach from all over Southern California to see the fireworks and the streets, sidewalks, Palisades Park, the beach, the Pier were flooded with people and cars. No question, it was a monstrous traffic/people jam and it lasted for hours, but no one seemed to mind.
   Then, one year, there was trouble. And City officials decreed that henceforth the fireworks would go off at dawn. "Dawn's Early Light," they called it, and they engaged an orchestra to play patriotic music on the Pier as a kind of warm-up. They reasoned that people would be more docile and, therefore, less trouble at dawn than they were at 9 p.m.. But, of course, many people were grumpy at having to get up in the dark and many other people were tired and bored because they’d stayed up all night. And so it was a more solemn gathering. And, of course, there was trouble again. And that was the end of the famous and fabulous fireworks on the Santa Monica beach.
   It may have been a sensible decision, but people don’t come to Santa Monica, or live here, because it’s sensible, and, if they do, they are bound to be disappointed, because the primary fact of Santa Monica is that it’s hard by the beach and the ocean, and any coast, especially this one, anyplace where land and oceans end and begin simultaneously is not even rational sometimes, much less sensible, and any effort to make it sensible, to tame it and make it docile and orderly is both pointless and foolish.
   Fireworks or not, 800,000 people came to our beaches over the three-day weekend. And they will come back again and again this summer and there will be traffic jams and there will undoubtedly be trouble here and there, but that is the nature of life on this sublime and occasionally dangerous edge and people who don’t relish a streak of noir in the sunlight don’t belong here.
   Over and over again this weekend, as on previous Fourth of July weekends, people mourned the absence of fireworks. To them, as to us, the show at Corsair Field on the Third is not only insufficient, it’s insulting. None of us has forgot, nor can forget the exaltation, the rapture of that great sky-and-ocean show and we can think of no grander millennial salute than the restoration of the fireworks on the Santa Monica beach the evening of July 4, 2000.