The day I became a wildebeest

Last Friday, on the 4th of July, I made plenty of mistakes. So many that I decided to create a to-undo list:

• Should we watch the fireworks in Legoland? The answer was no, but we were already in the parking lot.

• Do not underestimate the logistics of American leisure. Wear combinations of red, white and blue on July 4th. Any other color, particularly pink, signals stupidity.

• Bring a portable chair or, at the bare minimum, a towel to a fireworks event. Sitting on the floor without accessories is barbaric. You are not an animal.

• The expectation for the pre-fireworks show should be low. This is not Beyonce’s opening act. At most you get three young adults, one pretending to DJ, another jumping like a hysterical popcorn, and the final one, the one that is currently writing another to-undo list, hyperventilating inside of a full body LEGO costume, breathing their own sweat and tears, driving an imaginary racing car to the entrance of a real Emergency Department. This racing car prelude makes no sense until you reach a few to-undo points below.

• Legoland invests in bricks, not aerial illuminations. We were handed glasses by lethargic, chronically fatigued workers. I've never seen more fatigued workers than those at Legoland, except for the one that was asked to be a popcorn. The glasses, diffraction glasses with an added holographic film of Lego bricks on top of the grating if we want to be precise, were more expensive than the fireworks. Let’s ask ChatGPT to do the math. If professional fireworks cost about $2,000 per minute, and the Legoland show lasted approximately 5 minutes (being generous), that puts their pyrotechnics budget at around $10,000. The custom Lego diffraction glasses, on the other hand, cost between $0.40 and $1.00 per unit. With at least 10,000 people who had the original idea to spend July 4th at Legoland, that’s $4,000 to $10,000 in glasses alone. It is therefore entirely possible that they spent more money on the optical illusion of Lego bricks than on the actual fireworks. I say this with admiration. Most fireworks could be improved by ending four minutes earlier.

• Do not try to catch any star when people ask you to. At the very end of the show, they requested that we lift our hands to the sky to pick up a star. 10,000 people in diffraction glasses with one arm dutifully extended, like malfunctioning antennae, waiting for something to happen. I assume the person who scripted that moment is no longer with the company.

• I do not remember who first jumped into the Mara River. A river of red t-shirts stampeding towards the parking lot. We were all under attack. Just find the other red shirts, said someone to a kid who was separated from the pack (this is based on real events). It was an invisible race. The race only worked because we were all pretending we were not racing. Now the pre-firework show suddenly made sense. We didn’t want to look uncivilized. Just faster than the people behind us.

Hundreds of families returning to the parking lot

• Only the most experienced ones were able to make it to the car. We travelled at the speed of light. The guilt of keeping your offspring so late at night correlated with how fast you walked back to the car. The number of parental books read increased the speed by an additional 30 miles per hour. We were warriors. It was beautiful to see, like the wildebeest really. There were families sitting outside Legoland watching the whole thing like it was part of the show.

• Once we reached our car, we became swans. You would think there would at least be one commotion. None. At least not in the first fleet of TSA Pre-check and CLEAR certified members that we were part of. Some people may still be trapped in the Legoland parking lot. There is always one that gets eaten by the crocodile.

• Did you like them?, hoping the answer was yes. Fireworks pollute the air. They bring dust and hurt the earth. So, there’s that.

You can share your own 4th of July to-undo list at this link: