So I actually did leave the house. I put some air in the tires on my spent-too-much-for-it-to-leave-it-in-the-house-all-the-time mountain bike, grabbed a fanny pack and put my pager, cell phone, and sunglass case in it, and rode down to the Capitol. Left the house at 7pm. Concert started at 8pm.

Washington would be a perfectly bikeable city if it weren't for two things: the weather and the traffic. The weather wasn't completely terrible today, but it was muggier than I would have liked. And in spite of the traffic I figured this would be a pedestrian enough day that I could opt against wearing a helmet. That turned out okay, as I did not end up under the bumpers of any cars (I've done that once, and I'd prefer not to repeat it).

So I got down to the Capitol, where the NSO was playing a concert starting at 8pm. Unfortunately, while the Capitol is a lovely building and a nice place to assemble if you don't need to, um, see anything, there are a few too many trees to make it an optimal concert venue except for the few people who can devote an entire day to nothing more than staking their claim on a spot with a good view of both the stage and the Washington Monument in the distance. This meant that I, strolling up half an hour before "curtain" and with a bicycle playing the role of albatross, was not particularly likely to get an optimal spot for both listening and viewing.

I moved around a bit until the concert started. It was led by Barry Bostwick, who apparently is Patriot Actor Number One after playing George Washington in that miniseries years ago. It kicked off with the ever popular Seventy-Six Trombones from The Music Man, and bumped up and downhill from there.

Audra McDonald indeed has a glorious voice, and I should pay attention the next time she's performing anywhere near me so I can get a ticket and go see her under better circumstances. She did the National Anthem and didn't sound bad, which is all you can hope for from an old drinking song. She also did a couple things from the "dearly loved" Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Um. Dearly loved by the people who actually have bothered to pay attention to the music, but most people hear the names Rogers and Hammerstein and think Oklahoma, or The Sound of Music, and not Carousel, their thickest and most inaccessible work. Anyway.

Then they did two pieces by Aaron Copland. Do you want to guess which two they were? If you guessed Fanfare for the Common Man and the Hoedown from Rodeo you are correct. And a special note to Leonard Slatkin: it's not pronounced like the drive in Beverly Hills, it's pronounced like the thing with the horses and the bulls and the cowboys. Duh.

They then trotted out James Galway, because there's no better way to celebrate your country's independence than by featuring an artist from another one. Here's where things started to get unbearable. He started off with Baby Elephant Walk, moved onto Pie in the Face Polka, then an Irish jig I forget the name of, then something he just referred to as a tarantella, but which revealed itself to be "Funiculi, Funicula," among other things. Before the first one and between each of the others, he implored the crowd to get up and dance. Ugh. Having been to a number of Brave Combo shows where there was hardly enough room to stand, I can attest that it is impossible to polka properly under the sort of crowd conditions present on the West Lawn of the Capitol tonight.

After Galway, they introduced an actress as having received the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical last year - Kristen Chenoweth, for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I went, "wait." Then she said something, and I really went, "wait." I looked her up when I got home. I did a community theatre production of Anything Goes with her about 10 years ago. Small world. It's not like you could go up to her and go, "remember that guy who played one of the Chinese guys in Anything Goes, not the short one with the BO problem, but the other one, the tall guy? Remember him?" Well, I guess you could do that, but I doubt you'd get a positive reaction without the aid of a program with my name printed in it. And it's not like I'm now going to sell rights or anything ("touch me, I knew Kristen Chenoweth before she was famous"), but it's weird to hear somebody's name like that and go, "wait, don't I know her?"

Anyway, they did a medley of Peanuts stuff as a tribute to Charles Schulz, an odd mishmash of things from the Broadway show and some stuff by Vince Guaraldi - who had nothing to do with the Broadway show. Neither one of those really translates well to an outdoor orchestral show so I hopped back on my bike and headed to find a good spot to see the fireworks.

There was one place I almost stayed where I couldn't see the stage, but they had speakers turned around to go across the reflecting pool, and there was plenty of room within earshot of the speakers and sight of the Washington Monument. But then it occurred to me that there were four cannon on the other side of the reflecting pool (for the inevitable 1812 Overture), and I probably wouldn't want to be that close to them when they started firing. So I headed west and ended up across 14th Street from the Monument itself. This, I tell you, is pretty primo location.

I got there about ten minutes before 9:00, which means fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the fireworks. They started pretty much on time, first with lights on the Monument with gels or slides inserted so that the oversized blue mortar pattern familiar from the renovation scaffolding was back (nitpick - a couple of the slides were out of focus, on the north side they were skewed, and they didn't account for the extra distance the projections had to travel up top so the mortar pattern got bigger the higher it went, but anyway), then they relit it with full lights and started the fireworks. And wow.

It's pretty interesting to be near enough you can hear the mortars fire, since you get the effect of "whump ... sparkle ... boom," and depending on how many whumps you hear (they sound like a muted kick drum, but really loud) you can sorta predict how impressive the display up top is going to be. The really large ones had a significant enough explosion up in the air to provide a shock wave down on the ground, and this is the first time I've seen anybody actually keep the sky lit continuously for whatever extended period of time. Not to say that they did that for the full half hour of the show, but there would be long spans where the sky was pretty much fully lit by fireworks, instead of the usual "whump whump ... bang bang ... pause ... whump ... bang ... pause ..." you see in most municipal fireworks displays. The one complaint I'd have about the show itself wasn't really anybody's fault: there was so little wind that much of the display was obscured by its own smoke cloud. Whenever the breeze picked up, the fireworks looked better.

The show lasted half an hour and was by far the most impressive fireworks display I've ever seen, eclipsing last year's on the mall too. Although that might be the unfair advantage that last year I was on top of a building in Adams Morgan and this time I was a couple blocks away and had the Washington Monument, against which to measure the height of the fireworks.

So then I had to ride my bike back home through the ridiculous crowds. I just wanted to tell every pedestrian, "I will not hit you, as long as you don't walk into me." It took until Pennsylvania Ave before I managed to put some distance between myself and the pedestrian traffic on 14th Street. There were numerous DC police officers standing around in the intersections not even attempting to direct traffic. How that's supposed to help, I have no idea. Umm, crowd control? Anyone? The smell of Cordite (or whatever it is the fireworks use nowadays) was intense all the way to Penn as well, but it seemed to clear out around there.

Once I started up the hill at about G Street, the pedestrian traffic was behind me and I only had the car traffic to worry about, plus other bikers who did stupid things like get in front of me when I was stopped at a traffic light, then ride slower than me but make it impossible to pass them without getting dead. Argh. Luckily the number of pedestrians in the street meant that they had sort of mob rule, and there wasn't a whole lot of auto traffic to fight.

So on the whole, it was a pretty good way to spend the last Fourth of the old Millenium. I kinda wish the musical programming weren't quite so heavy on the old saws, but I guess even the NSO has to put butts in seats and the people who provide the funding probably ask specifically for things like Fanfare for the Common Man and the Hoedown from Rodeo (otherwise known (*shudder*) as the "Beef. It's what's for dinner" song), since those things mean "America" to so many people.

Me, I'd love to hear Audra McDonald do, say, "My Man's Gone Now," or maybe let's get Dawn Upshaw to come sing "This is Prophetic." Let's hear something we don't have to hear every year, please please please. I guess I'm asking too much.

(2000-07-04)