We barely had finished setting up camp at Wompatuck State Park and quickly then found our way to the Quincy Adams train station. For old Bellinghamsters, figuring out a big city train can be intimidating, but thanks to a sympathetic and super-helpful Bostonian, complete with accent, we got the Inbound Redline to “Chahls.” Feeling this urban hipness starting to surge, Fred tapped away on his cellphone (like everyone else on the train), found a restaurant and ordered a picnic dinner online so that we could pick it up on the route from Charles St to the Hatch Shell, the venue where America’s Orchestra, the Boston Pops, performs its 4th of July Spectacular.
With chairs and dinner in hand we joined the crowd funneling onto the Esplanade for the July 3rd rehearsal, the same show without the fireworks of July 4th. As a dress rehearsal show, it was not supposed to be as crowded (they estimate 500,000 attend on the 4th), but we couldn’t imagine many more people, having lost count at 427,342 including the Boston Police, EMTs and Military Police.
We squeezed in almost two hours before the show started, somewhat to the dismay of the folks nearby who must have gotten there another two hours early to stake their spot. For the actual event on the 4th, people start lining up at 4:30 AM; that’s sixteen hours early. Some people have way too much leisure time.
We settled in, enjoyed dinner, and, as usual, Milissa struck up conversations with the neighboring concert-goers. The show was a wide mix of patriotic music from the Navy Sea Chanters chorus to some Woodstock nostalgia from Arlo Guthrie.
With the Boston Pops cranking it out in the background, Queen Latifah, Amanda Meno, 16 year old phenom from “America’s Got Talent,” and the Texas Tenors belted out Americana to crowd of young and old who seemed to have left their widening biases and worries about our country behind to sit in the park and appreciate the day. Yet we thought the best part of the evening was poetry, in this case from our Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman. What a talented young woman. We highly recommend you check out her poem, “Believer’s Hymn for the Republic“.
Happy 4th everyone!
https://funitude.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/quik_2019-07-04_11-12-37-1.mov