Fireworks

The movie Dutch. 

Ed O’Neil, playing the character Dutch, stopped at the firework stands at the state line. They had it on camera. And me, an eleven-year-old Alabama boy, felt like a star. I’d been there. Right to those stands in Tennessee. Glowing, teeming with life & neon and No Smoking signs. Captured forever on 35mm film and broadcast onto a grainy VHS tape that I watched over and over and over.

All the while thinking of summer and of a trip north, to those stands, to become famous.