Sunday, December 31, 2006
I Have Been to the Holy Land...
If U2, Bruce Springsteen or Aerosmith could get fans to pay $15 a carload, then line them up 60 cars at a time to hear three prerecorded songs, do you think they'd gladly, as Steve Miller once sang, "Take the Money and Run"?
That's what's happened to the artist formerly known as Carson Williams. He's the Cincinnati-area guy I wrote about a couple weeks ago who set his Christmas light display to music. Really....scroll down if you missed it.
Anyway, whilst home to Cincinnati over the holidays, we piled my sister-in-law and husband, their four kids and my wife and me into their Chevy Suburban and shuffled off to Mason, Ohio, Heritage Oak Park: a 30-mile drive, but well worth it when all is said and done. I posted some video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Il4PmW5NFg.
More professional video is here.
Sweet, right?
Guilty pleasure alert: We plunked down our $15 and waited more than an hour to make our way through the park, then queued up with our group of 30 cars to watch Christmas lights on a mock-up of Williams' house, which stood out in the middle of a ballfield.
Apparently, we were part of the heaviest night of the holiday season to that point. According to the Mason Pulse-Journal:
Christmas may be over, but Mason's Christmas in Lights is keeping the holiday spirit alive until the end of the year.
Carson Williams' light display at Heritage Oak Park on U.S. 42 seems to be gaining popularity as the holiday season nears its end.
Williams' display at his home in Deerfield Twp. last year became an Internet sensation and was featured in a Miller Lite beer commercial.
"We're up to a little over 8,000 cars now," said Tom Kaper, president of Festivals of Mason Inc., which is overseeing the display. "We're really starting to stuff them in over the last couple of weeks. It's going great."
The display nearly reached its capacity Saturday night when 792 carloads of people came out to see the lights synchronized to some favorite Christmas songs. The show can accommodate 800 cars a night on weekends.
Kaper and Williams won't get much time to catch a breath once the lights blink off Dec. 31. Discussions for next year's display we'll start in January — and Kaper said they've already got some ideas of how to make the show bigger and better.
Do the math: $15 per car x 8,000 cars. That's a cool $120,000. Granted, there was probably one HELL of an electric bill that went with this deal. Question: Can they re-use the house facades?
And let us not be unduely cynical. It was a serious rush hearing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards of Winter," the song that made Williams famous, blasting from the stereo while watching lights dance across a house-sized wooden truss. Sounds stupid, right? Guess you had to be there.
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Northern peoples love them some lights in Winter. Just the falls of the Clifton Gorge Mill. Just like the illuminated "Udder of Hope" at Young's Dairy(probably renamed the Freedom Udder in our current imperialist nightmare. Just like a Pink Floyd "LaZer" show at the Dayton Planetarium except that I ain't rollin' with my "moms" and I am just this many mushrooms caps short of Gary Busey on a BAD day.