Pops in the Park 2008: Big Deal in Big Spring
Category: Travel...
Posted Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 02:55 PM [GMT-6]

My pal Gregg emailed me this link to a YouTube video showing a skydiver towing an American flag the size of a basketball court*. It's certainly inspiring, but not unique, as we witnessed something similar last Thursday just forty miles down the interstate in Big Spring.

The occasion was the 11th annual "Pops in the Park" featuring the Big Spring Symphony and Chorus**, a surprisingly impressive fireworks display (more below), and an aerialist with a large US flag trailing behind. The flag obviously wasn't as big as the one in the video, but the scene was appreciated by the large crowd seated in the amphitheater and across the city park.

The Symphony and Chorus performed a full program of patriotic standards, plus some familiar medleys (salutes to Irving Berlin, George Cohan, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example). But the real treat came after nightfall, when we entered the "Fireworks Music" portion of the program.

I freely admit that we traveled to Big Spring with lowered expectations about what we'd see. After all, a town of 25,000 or so surely has limited resources to apply to something like this. Were we ever wrong! The fireworks display, in conjunction with the music of the symphony, rivaled and then exceeded anything we've seen in Midland.

It's difficult to adequately capture the impact of such a performance, especially on a point-and-shoot camera in movie mode, but here's a brief sample of the production, featuring the finale to the 1812 Overture. Perhaps it will give you a taste of the experience.

It didn't hurt that the weather was flawless and the crowd large, happy, and well-behaved. The city's amphitheater and park are a wonderful venue for an event of this nature, and it's obvious that the entire community turned out to support it. Even if it didn't take place on the Fourth of July, we left with a renewed sense of the awesome privilege of living in a free and prosperous nation. Thank you, Big Spring, for giving us that reminder.

*The analogy is surprisingly apt. According to this website, a regulation basketball court is 94' x 50', which gives an aspect ratio of 1:1.88. The US Flag Code specifies that the American flag will have an aspect ratio of 1:1.9. I doubt that James Naismith had this comparison in mind when he invented basketball, but it's a comfortable coincidence for an American sport. (Oh, and "thank you" to Larry and Deborah Hendrick [she of the exquisite Glove Box Stories], proprietors of Flags Bay, for the excellent source material for the dimensions and rules for handling the American flag!)

**You didn't realize that Big Spring had a symphony? Join the club. Turns out that they have a quite good one, although many of the members are also in the Midland-Odessa Symphony. The conductor, Dr. Keith Graumann, is a Big Spring resident.