The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Thank You, Tip-Jar Hitters!

Posted on | July 4, 2025 | No Comments

A finale board from our 2019 show

Thinking back on the history of our family’s pyrotechnical celebrations of American independence, the 2020 show was probably the apogee, the zenith, the ne plus ultra. We had 35 cases worth of fireworks that year, and the grand finale was nearly a minute of extreme intensity.

 

That was the conclusion of an 11-minute show and, really, you shouldn’t go longer than that. I’ve watched a lot of videos of backyard shows, including some d0ne with electrical firing systems that make possible a greater precision of effects. But no matter how excellent your planning and execution may be, if your show is much longer than 10 minutes, the audience will get bored. There are only so many different effects available, and after a few minutes of boom-boom-boom, it becomes repetitive. What we do — how I learned it, back 20 years ago when I was haunting the online message boards of fireworks enthusiasts — to help avoid this problem is what is called the “roller coaster” approach. You build up to a peak, then go back down, then peak again, and back down until at the end, you blow their minds with a massive finale barrage.

What really counts in a finale is intensity, which can be expressed mathematically as “breaks per second” (BPS). The bursting of a fireworks shell is called the “break,” which is not always synonymous with the number of shots being fired, because not every shot has a break. Some shots are comets or mines that don’t produce an exploding break. In our shows, we usually include what are called Color Pearl cakes (48 or 96 shots) that are just small red and green comets, in order to Create a multilevel effect — the little comets going up from the bottom, with the big shells breaking up top. You can also do this using roman candles.

Roman candle racks from our 2020 show

We’ll be shooting a dozen 48-shot Color Pearl cakes in one of our finales this year, which means 576 little red and green comets flying into the air in the span of about 20 seconds. You’ll notice I said “one of our finales,” because part of the “roller coaster” method of doing a fireworks show is building up to at least one fake finale before you do the massive barrage of the Grand Finale. If you execute this properly, with the fake finale intense enough to make people think this is the end, then give about a 10-second delay (“pause for applause,” as we say), it’s a pretty shocking thing for the audience when you hit the fuse for the real finale.

Thanks to generous donations from the tip-jar hitters, I’m now looking at an inventory list that tells me we’ve got 374 shots in the 30-second real finale — an intensity of 12 shots per second. Is that enough?

Well, there’s no such thing as “enough,” probably, but I’ve sent thank-you notes to several of y’all who chipped in to help me acquire this year’s fireworks stash. That includes Bernard in Wisconsin, Stephen in Arkansas, a certain resident of Connecticut, and a young Virginia fellow who says he might be able to make it up to see our show when we shoot next Saturday, July 12, in West Virginia. The reason for that delay is that one of my grandsons is at camp this week, so in order for him to be able to see the show, we had to postpone it by eight days. Which means . . .

Maybe I could hit the fireworks stores again this coming week and take advantage of their deep post-4th of July discounts to add even more boom-boom to that finale! It’s certainly not too late to remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 


 

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Category: Fireworks

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