"Hey Ya'll Watch This"

Happy 4th Of July weekend!!! If ever a holiday begged to be subtitled "Hey ya'll watch this", this is the one. After living in the south most all of my life, I can tell you a holiday that involves explosives, alcohol and hill billys/rednecks has all the ingredients necessary for hilarious, ridiculous, reckless, stupid, and down right funny behaviors to occur.

I do not know what the laws are in your communities concerning fireworks, but where I grew up they were strictly prohibited. If the local law enforcement community discovered a stash before the 4th, it was confiscated and added to the arsenal for the public display. Since you could not get fireworks in the state and had to travel to neighboring states to purchase fireworks ( at least 1 1/2 hours ), it was not a law that was really hard to enforce in our area. I will say that we had some of the best displays I have ever seen. However the best ever title belongs to the fireworks display I saw was while at a band camp in Maryville Tennessee.

Now with that said, imagine my shock when we moved to Florida and some types of fireworks are legal to shoot. What is legal varies from city to city. However, due to the recent fires and the fire danger still being high, our area begged people to attend the public displays and refrain from shooting their own. Apparently the instructions were not explicit enough for the redneck/hill billy's because this year they brought their fireworks with them to the public displays. Before the city started their display, people were setting off fireworks less that 50 ft away from us.

As you can imagine with large groups of people gathered in an area there are lots of opportunities of "Hey ya'll watch this" waiting to happen. Unfortunately none of the possible incident's completely unfolded. But here are just a few of the possible scenarios that we had. There was the family of women that resembled female Sumo wrestlers. The younger one climbed into the back of the family pick up truck and that display was enough to let you know that some people should not wear hip huggers. After being in the back of the truck for a while she apparently decided that was not where she wanted to be and began the very amusing (at least for us) process of attempting to get out of the back. We had visions of her going splat on the pavement. Much to our disappointment, she managed to get out without bodily harm to the truck (or to herself or her hip huggers). Then there was the older "sister" that was sitting on a beach lounger that was sagging precariously. Again another lesson that there are somethings that some types of people should not do. She managed to get through the entire three hours without the seat collapsing with her in it (again much to our disappointment). And last but not least from this group was the mother. She brought along her own fireworks entertainment in the form of some kind of sparkler but not the kind on the stick. In true redneck form she burned up 97.6% of them before it was dark. She also provided us with a fashion don't by wearing a mid riff baring tank top. When she became bored with her fireworks, she went to the car and got a wheel chair out to sit in. That in and of itself was not bad idea but the chair was not designed for someone of her rather large size. The buttons on the back were decidedly stressed even from our distance of approximately 30 feet away. We had visions of dodging popping buttons/rivets at any moment. The next group of note had two girls younger than Meghan. They were setting off a pre - city display of fireworks in the parking lot redneck style. They were around 50 feet away and having a grand time. Some members of that group were more plastered than the group at the bar 200 feet away. Then was the near skateboard/bike collision.

Just a few hours earlier the lawn service truck backed their lawn mower off the the trailer and jump started the truck with it. (In front of the auto parts store) A very true redneck moment.

Now being a southern girl myself, I did my own version of the "Hey ya'll watch this". A couple girls that Meghan knew showed up and sat near us. The girls all started trying to turn cartwheels. Well it felt like a dare and the southern in me could not resist. I showed them up and started turning cartwheels with them in our part of the parking lot. The one little girl was impressed to find that adults knew how to do cartwheels. She tried to get me to do a one handed cart wheel and a front handspring. I managed to avoid that dare and keep the southern in me tightly reined simply because I have a healthy respect for my body or maybe just a real lack of desire to see a hospital again anytime soon as a patient.

While watching and observing all this, I learned that my husband can be almost as catty as a woman. (my mom defends him though and says he was simply being amusing) So the next time he attempts to tell his mom and I we are being catty, I will remind him of his own cattiness might actually make us look more like "kittens".

Also for those of you that want to annoy Alan, the Small World song and Pac Man Fever are not the only ones to use. ( Bryan if you still have a copy of Pac Man Fever I would sure love to have one also.) The theme song from the ice cream truck(Turkey in the Straw) will do the trick nicely as well. The ice cream truck parked behind us for about 2 hours playing the song over and over and over...!!

On the way home, we took fire and Alan was looking for air support as the rednecks continued firing off their personal arsenals. One salvo fired directly over his head. The worse part was all he saw was the glow - he did not get to enjoy the actual display.

The best "Hey ya'll watch this" came from Kelli today - down the street from her they managed to set the displays off spectacularly into the side of a car. Of course that could have had better results besides a huge dent:)

We are gearing up for another simulation of living in Beirut until well after 2 in the morning. Despite pleadings from local officials to please enjoy the public displays of fireworks, the "hill billy's" were still out in force with their own displays and will remain so for the weekend. The catch here was before we became homeowners, we thought all of this was kind of cool (after all we are southerners), but now we are more concerned about our property than the coolness of it all.

Oh and Frank, we all missed you even though you called and we still have your roast beef sandwich waiting for you.

For those of us that are southerners we tend to think that the hill billy and redneck titles are exclusive to us; however, I can assure after living in Florida for 6 years, the terms redneck and hill billy do not know geographical, regional, national or ethnic boundaries.