Portraits On the Fourth of July

A girl in the crowd takes a selfie. Her tam o’shanter sparkles because of the fireworks going off in the background. At the gates of Moscow Tchaikovsky runs away hands over his ears. The girl with the cell is as pretty as her friend beside her, but her friend outshines the tam o’shanter as if it were just an ordinary beret. She has sapphires in her eyebrows. Kids in earshot of adults ‘wow’ or mouth age-appropriate obscenities. The limp body of a teenage messiah is elbowed and pushed around by his disciples. Several rows back, a woman is laughing as she cranes her neck skyward. From the chin up, she looks like Greta Garbo, only she is short and fat. Rockets fly like fan-dancing ostriches. The truncated 1812 Overture burps to a close. My lens can’t capture the woman or the girl, or her friend who now shines like a diamond. I can’t fit all of this into 12 mega pixels. The night stops throwing cannonballs at 1 a.m.