Fireworks in a Fire Zone- bad news

Watching fireworks atop a roof in the fire zone: BAD idea!

Last night I joined my friends at Midtown crossing on a rooftop patio owned by the condo association. About 100 people gathered for fireworks and beer and guacamole, and for some show-offs, an 8 course meal and wine. The patio sits on top of a parking garage right next to the Summit Building. (And by right next to, I mean we could look up and see the people on top of the building setting off the fireworks.)

All day we said, “Are they going to hit us?” and all day our friend said, “No, last year they just looked like they were going to hit us, but the wind carried all the debris to the other side.We’ll be fine.”

No good ever comes from the phrase, “We’ll be fine.”

We should have known it was a bad idea when firemen began to appear like snipers all around us, looming in the windows and hallways and stairwells of the condo in full uniform. If not then, we should have known when the fire trucks began to park in the alleys surrounding the rooftop and condos and the firemen looked at us and waved with all these fake smiles, like, “Hey guys, get a load of these idiots…”

We just waved back and laughed at the warning signs posted all around releasing the city from liability. Ha! Risk, schmisk! If it was really that risky, they wouldn’t even let us up here.

In my crazy imaginative mind, I pictured the entire scene as a musical where all of us were wining and dining at dusk, and out of no where, music began and the ladders of the fire trucks lifted to the rooftops with singing, dancing firemen attached. But of course that’s not what happened.

What happened was that fireworks—the biggest, most spectacular CLOSE up, scarily beautiful fireworks—started going off directly above us, and everyone ooh-ed and ahh-ed and said to each other, “Hey, they didn’t let them off on our side last year, this is awesome!”

And then someone punched me in the back of the shoulder, HARD.I dropped my drink and turned around to see who had slugged me or thrown their shoe at me or whatever, and simultaneously, like 20 other people were standing and running and yelling and ducking for cover.

That’s when I saw that it was a giant 3-inch cylinder clay firework plug.Then came the flaming pieces of paper and cardboard, and two seconds later we were hit again, this time by a giant metal HOT one on that bounced off Erin’s side, jumped up my pant leg and bounced off my sandal, and then another clay plug on Laura’s head.This happened for 20 minutes while everyone on the roof hid under lawn chairs and blankets and checked each other’s eyes with cell-phone lights and screamed, “It wasn’t like this last year!”

You know those crazy firemen were laughing their heads off in those condo windows.

In the spirit of honesty, I peed my pants a little.Not when the boom of the fireworks scared the living piss out of me, not when I was hit by a clay plug or when Erin got hit by a metal firework or when Laura got hit in the glasses or when Erin thought she was blinded. Nope. Not even when more than a comfortable amount of people pressed against me in the elevator on the basement level or when the elevator got stuck between the second and third floors for more than a comfortable amount of time or when the elevator took us back to the basement and broke for good, or even when we had to walk up 4 flights of stairs in the fire escape.It was when we stepped into the apartment and the bathroom was actually in sight. Then I peed a little. Sometimes I have a delayed reaction.

A picture is worth a thousand words: Erin’s burnt side.