Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd, Soul Sand.

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Phil Grucci: When that 20-minute, or 15-, 20-, 25-minute fireworks show is happening, you turn around and you look at the faces of the audience. And you could have an 80-year-old grandfather sitting next to a seven-year-old grandson, and the expression on their face is almost identical with the exception of maybe some wrinkles on the grandfather’s face.

Jo Reed: That is Phil Grucci, President and CEO of Fireworks by Grucci, a family business that’s been lighting up the skies for six generations. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

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Fireworks have long been associated with July 4th celebrations, and when I think of Fireworks, I think of the Grucci Family. For six generations, stretching back to Italy, the Grucci’s have been in the forefront of some of the most spectacular and innovative fireworks displays. That’s like choreography in light across the skies. They hold nine Guinness World records, and they’ve created spectacular displays at major celebrations in the United States including three Olympic games, eight presidential inaugurations, the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge, and of the Statue of Liberty, the nation’s bicentennial, the bicentennial of the Star Spangled Banner and New Year’s Eve Millennium Celebrations across 12 Time Zones. And I’m truly just touching the surface of their impressive resume. Fireworks are a glorious mixture of art, science, and tradition. I love the spectacle but I’m also curious about how it all comes together. How do they do what they do? While the days around July 4th are particularly busy for Fireworks by Grucci, President and CEO Phil Grucci and his daughter Lauren who is a pyrotechnician and photographer were gracious enough to give me their time and schlep into a Long island studio. It was particularly gracious of Lauren who was getting over a cold. I began my conversation with Phil and Lauren with my first introduction to Fireworks by Grucci…the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983.

Jo Reed: The Brooklyn Bridge was the first big fireworks display I had ever seen. And oh my God it was just one of the most glorious nights of my life. It was fabulous.

Phil Grucci: We've always said in the family that the Brooklyn Bridge performance set a benchmark that we've always been compared against, our shows have always been compared against that one performance. And it raised the level of size and complication and precision of some of our bigger performances.

Jo Reed: Oh, I would think so. And I do want to talk about the Brooklyn Bridge in depth later on. You also do, you know, Fourth of July displays for a lot of small and midsize cities. It's not just always the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. How many shows are you doing this July 4th? Just a ballpark.

Phil Grucci: Approximately each year, 60 to 65 performances from here in New York as far up north as Maine and Boston on the Charles River and as far out west as Hawaii at Pearl Harbor. And Hickam Air Force Base, as well as Schofield Barracks for the Army.

Jo Reed: And how many people will be working for you this July 4th? How many people are you sending out?

Phil Grucci: We have a fulltime team of 200 employees and our part-time staff is about 500 pyrotechnicians and they’re made up of everything from accountants to mechanics to lawyers to, you name it, artists. They spend a week with us or two weeks with us on their vacation time and they’ll go out and produce a fireworks show in Washington DC or anywhere around the entire country.

Jo Reed: I know each show that you create is unique and really fitting for the place where it's going to happen. And I'm very curious about how you design it because fireworks, to me, just seems like this extraordinary combination of artistry and technology. Let's go through the process of how we would create this display. Where do we start?

Phil Grucci: Sure. In fact, we’re going through that right now. We had an inquiry come in yesterday for a fireworks program in two weeks on the 28^th of June. And as we just discussed we’re in the process of preparing for about 65 fireworks shows on the weekend of Fourth of July. So the first step is to understand what the theme is of the performance, why do they want us? Why do they want to commission us to perform? So we set the theme. We understand where the performance space is: is it on a barge, is it in a ballfield, is it in the big field, is it on the roof of a building. And then we have to discuss budget, naturally. Budget determines the size and scope of the program and, also, the degree of difficulty as it relates to the scope. Then we look at the creative side of it and we generate a soundtrack working, again, with the theme of the performance, what is the reason. Fourth of July, naturally the soundtrack is very patriotic, red, white, and blue. Then comes the time where myself and members of the creative team would actually design the performance. So every beat of music, every second and in some cases tenths and hundredths of seconds, we're plotting what product is going to perform to that piece of music at that moment? It takes about an hour to an hour-and-a-half of every minute depending on the difficulty, the size and scope of the performance to design the show. Once the design is completed then it goes into a programming mode because most of our performances are displayed with a computer. It's controlled and fired with a computer system. So, there may be a program that has approximately 4 or 5,000 lines of code that gives the computers instructions of what to fire and when to fire it and at what location it’s positioned in. So once all the administrative and technical aspects of the platform are established, the logistics side of the house really kicks in and that's what my son, Christopher, Lauren’s brother Christopher, and his cousin Cory are doing now, is they plan the permitting process and how do you get a permit to fire off the roof of the Lincoln Center,. And, also, schedule all the pyrotechnicians; depending on the size of the performance you could have a minimum of two pyrotechnicians on the performance or it could have 15, 20. The largest show we've ever produced had 250 pyrotechnicians on it. So it's all that behind the scenes work that has to happen that people don't realize that moving a team from here from Long Island to wherever that destination is so you have to fly in there, you put have to put them in hotels, you have to feed them. It’s a lot of logistics.

Jo Reed: And you also have to transport the fireworks which can't be easy.

Phil Grucci: That's correct. And there's a department that we have within our logistics team that manages all the transportation. And we’re not transporting gloves. We’re transporting explosives. So, escorts going through cities, road closures, bridge closures and things of that nature all have to be planned from the origin which is here in New York. And then the installation in the field, actually the location that we’re going to perform from takes place and it could be a minimum of one day, a small municipal-type program to some of the larger-scale programs we’re on site two or three weeks. Lauren, you were on site in Dubai for what, almost a month, to do the world record performance?

Lauren Grucci: Yes. I was in Dubai for almost a month and then I was in Qatar for three-and-a-half weeks, I believe, because it was multiple shows back to back to back.

Jo Reed: And Lauren, you’re a pyrotechnicians. You've been trained to do this?

Lauren Grucci: I am. I'm licensed through Grucci, so I’m a licensed pyrotechnicians. And I also hold a license in New York and Massachusetts.

Jo Reed: And can you tell me what exactly that means? If I’m a licensed pyrotechnician, what does that mean that I do and can do?

Lauren Grucci: Well, through Fireworks by Grucci it doesn't mean you just have a license to do a fireworks show anywhere on your own—it's through the company. But holding the licenses in New York and Massachusetts are important because a lot of times with those programs you have to have somebody that is licensed through the state’s fire department. If you hold a license that's particular to the state then you kind of hold like a specialist-- would you say a special position on it because logistically because you have to have a licensed person on site.

Phil Grucci: You take the ultimate responsibility for the program/

Jo Reed: I see. How many varieties of fireworks do you have at your disposal?

Phil Grucci: Right now, our inventory has about 3800 different stock keeping units which are different varieties of products that we can select from. That's not the quantity. The quantity is in the millions, but the individual varieties and sizes and colors there's about 3800 units that we can select from. So when the time comes to sit there in front of the blank piece of paper to script the program, it's like scoring the characters that are in a ballet. You know, some are very robust and Baroque-like. And some are very delicate, soft and you match those characters to the music and, also, the movement of where you're performing from. So if you're on a tower and you’ve got a long linear line, for example, we've performed on the world's tallest building in Dubai, called the Burj Khalifa. And when you have a 2700-foot vertical line to work with as a stage you try to match that product and its characteristics to the building and, also, the music.

Jo Reed: And you also make custom fireworks. And I'm thinking most specifically of the American flag at the anniversary of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at Fort McHenry.

Phil Grucci: That was one of the real true organic honors that we've ever had, when we were called in to produce that program. We were asked what could we do that's different to celebrate our national anthem and to celebrate the flag. And we just developed this microchip technology and, also, this effect called a pixel burst. And it was a dream always to put a flag—the American flag in the sky with this technology. And the timing was just so very perfect.

Jo Reed: Wait, wait, wait, what’s a pixel burst?

Phil Grucci: The pixel burst, it's an aerial shell that gets launched from a very specific mortar. And it has a microchip inside so it can control the time that it takes from the launching from the mortar until you burst it in the sky. And if you can control the speed that it’s lifting, it's called the muzzle velocity, you can control that and you can control the time that it travels you can, in a very abstract manner you can control the height that the shell is going to burst in the air. So in that particular case we designed and engineered an American flag to be fired at Fort McHenry. And I've got to tell you when that went off, even right now I get goosebumps, because it was just such an honor to see that. The whole family was there when we had that because we were anticipating—and it is a lot of pressure when you have an event like that and you’re pulling at that kind of technology and premiering it to the nation. It's quite energetic when your heartbeat is thumping out of your chest when that button is pushed.

Lauren Grucci: I photographed that show. So, a lot of times I handle the media on the larger shows, the internal media, so it’s coordinating photographers and videographers; and myself I photograph the fireworks as well. And that show, I remember, that was the first time that we had ever photographed those type of fireworks. And photographing fireworks, in general, is always—you know, it's tricky. You have to really know how the camera works and how to apply it to the fireworks and different colors of fireworks photograph different ways. So to have a giant American flag with fireworks that basically were bursting over and over and over again I remember it was like we had three photographers and I think we each had maybe four cameras each. And they were all set to different things and it was just like, okay, here comes the flag.

Phil Grucci: And you nailed it. You captured it.

Lauren Grucci: Oh, yeah.

Jo Reed: It was. I was there. It was wonderful. It was just-- when the American flag went up I was speechless.

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Phil Grucci: Well, it caught everybody by surprise. They were like did I just see the American flag in the sky?

Lauren Grucci: Well, the letters, too, and the numbers.

Phil Grucci: You see the cartoon bursting above the capital and things like that but they've never seen it, nor have we, in that kind of a scale, until that happened. And Lauren and the team when they were photographing it a big part of the mystery is, okay, we enjoy the fact that the show went off safely. We really don't enjoy the program in its entirety because we’re kind of focused on the technical and the safety aspect. So when all the dust and the smoke settles all of a sudden all of the attention then turns to them, to Lauren and the team, and going did you capture it? Did you get it? What does the video look like? I want to see the pictures because everybody is so impatient to see everything that she has on all of the cameras that they captured it on.

Lauren Grucci: Yeah, some people will come up to you and, "Can we see? Can we see?" I'm like I haven't even looked yet.

Phil Grucci: I haven’t even looked at it.

Jo Reed: You know, I'm so interested in your family history because Phil, you’re the fifth generation. Lauren you’re the sixth. Tell me about the history of the company that became Grucci.

Phil Grucci: Well, the history dates back to 1850 in a little seaside town in Italy called Bari, Italy on the Adriatic Seaside. My second great-grandfather and his son Anthony were in Italy and they emigrated through Ellis Island, like many immigrants in the United States had done through Ellis Island, back in the early 1900s. When they were in Italy, the industry was really very small and mostly they competed for the products that they made. They would compete against each other on who made the best firework device, not necessarily the best show. When they came here into the United States they came here basically with a shoebox with some formulas in it and a dream to be in the United States and make a business out of it. And they settled out here in Long Island in a little town called Elmont, New York and they opened their small, very small factory, a few buildings in the early 1900s. My grandfather then became apprenticed under his grandfather and his uncle. And then he opened his own factory in 1929 in the village of Bellport which we live in today, to this day and our studio is in Bellport, also. And he built his business and his facility. Although in the scale and size of today's day it was very small, but back then it was a very refined facility. So he worked until the early seventies. And my father, which was the oldest of three children, which is the fourth generation of the family, ended up working with his dad, very much like I did with my dad. And then, my father took a role, which is the fourth generation with his brother, my uncle Felix, and his sister, my aunt Donna, and they took it from the seventies to the eighties. My dad was very energetic to try new things. And we ended up going in 1979 to Monte Carlo to compete in the Olympics of fireworks, if you will. And we won the competition. And that's where we were dubbed, when we came back to the United States with the gold medal, America's First Family of Fireworks. And my dad, my uncle, and my and aunt, they made the fourth generation up. Unfortunately, in 1983, we did have the only industrial accident in our family’s history that took my father's life and took a cousin of mine's life. And the business was turned upside down. We had nothing to build off of other than the unity of the family and the unity of the name. Every generation up to my generation, being the fifth-generation, had the ability to participate with the family at a very young age before you were formally 18, which is the legal age. Now, with the regulations and oversight that's out there Lauren and Christopher and Corey, of the sixth generation, they really never touched anything until they were 18 years old, formally. So in the early eighties I became very active with my uncle and my aunt within the business and we produced some fantastic programs including 1983 the Brooklyn Bridge, the inaugural of President Reagan, the Olympics in Lake Placid, things of that nature and that put us on the national stage.

Jo Reed: And the Statue of Liberty.

Phil Grucci: And the Statue of Liberty in 1986, that's correct. And then we had the opportunity to go overseas into the Middle East in the nineties and going into the millennium year. In the millennium year we displayed right off of the Washington Monument, which is another milestone where we set performing on very sensitive structures. So our performance platform then ended up expanding to bridges and buildings. And nd anything you could look at we would look at that with a lot of energy to want to get on to the top or onto the sides of that structure, buildings and towers and the such. So four years ago, we successfully managed and created a succession plan to allow my aunt and my uncle to retire. They were ready to retire. We went through the valuation of a small business. And now it's the fifth generation and the sixth generation that are operating the company with my nephew Corey running the personnel side. My son Christopher is working and managing the logistics side. Lauren is involved from the photography and pyrotechnician side. And we have many people that don't have the last name Grucci that have been with us for years. And I do have to say without those people and the loyalty and the passion that they also have, as the family has, we would never be where we are right now. So the shout-out to them is important to acknowledge that our staff has grown to over 200 fulltime employees. And right now when you're looking at a studio here in New York and what's happening in our factory down in Virginia, they're all focused on the same prize, as getting through the Fourth of July safely and celebrating our Independence Day.

Jo Reed: What about some of the safety precautions that you have to take? How far away does the audience have to be from the shells for example?

Phil Grucci: Many jurisdictions that we work in, states and various countries, have different requirements. But we work on the basis of for every inch in diameter of the shell a minimum we have to have of 70 feet to the audience or to any liability. So if we have a 10-inch in diameter aerial shell, where you multiply that by 70 feet, 10 by 70, it gives 700 feet to the audience that we have to be with a launching a 10-inch in diameter shell. Distance is our biggest protection, the largest protection to the audience is having the proper distance. The audience, also, needs to be educated in many cases that the closer you are, the less comfortable it is to watch a fireworks display because you're craning way back looking straight up into the sky. And over 20 minutes that becomes a little bit uncomfortable. So the farther back you are when you have a nice 30-degree angle looking at the show is the best position to be in any way.

Jo Reed: And what are some of the safety precautions that you take in the factory? I read that you only let four people in a building at the same time.

Phil Grucci: That’s correct. Some of the buildings are a little larger, where we can have the size of the team that's in there just slightly larger. But we look at it by the square footage of each one of the buildings or the bays, the rooms that are in the building, determine the number of operators that could be in that bay depending on the size and how many doors for egress there are in the building Naturally, in an explosives manufacturing facility one of our biggest enemies is static electricity. So the floors are conductive. They wear special shoes. They have safety glasses on. And they have cotton overcoats and personal protective equipment that they have to wear. And then, also, one of the other key factors of safety is the minimum quantities in every one of the workspaces. So only what you need for that one hour of work is what you have in front of you. You don't load the building up with a large quantity of explosives and you only really need 10 pounds of it and you have 500 pounds sitting in the building unnecessarily. So there's many different procedures that we have to follow in the factory and, also, out in the field.

Lauren Grucci: Yeah. I was going to say there's a lot of safety procedures that every pyrotechnician is trained to follow so that we’re safe in the field. So, for instance, everyone is trained on how to handle the fireworks because that's a big thing. You know, they have paper casings so looking at them they don't look like they’re as powerful as they are. It can be kind of easy when you're working on these long shows to start to—not underestimate, but you just always have to keep in mind the that you are handling explosives. So, everyone’s trained on how to handle them and how to load them and you never put your body over any type of mortars that are loaded or any firework that's wired, for instance. Or you don't throw anything. Everything is handled basically like a fine China is basically kind of how you want to handle everything. But even write down to the clothes you wear and making sure you have hardhats and there's just a lot of details that you have to pay attention to on site to make sure that everything is safe and everything goes smoothly.

Jo Reed: Okay. Now, here's the very basic question—What are fireworks made of? And how do you make the colors?

Phil Grucci: Fireworks have not really changed much in the last 50 years as it relates to the engineering of a build other than the pixel burst type of innovations utilizing the electronics and the microchips. It's basically made of a papier-mâché type outer casing made out of cardboard that holds all of the components that are on the inside of an aerial shell. The aerial shells launch from a mortar tube, which is basically a cylinder that has a plug on the bottom, to close in the pressure and be able to launch it. It's very similar to a cannonball that gets launched out of a cannon barrel. We use black powder; that’s our primary ingredient in every firework because we use it as a lifting charge to lift it out of the mortar. We use it also inside that cardboard, hard-cardboard casing as a bursting charge to break the case open and light all of the components that are on the inside of that. So the components that are on the inside of the shell are generally placed inside that shell manually. The manufacturing of fireworks is very much a manual operation with the exception of some components that we press with automated equipment. So the components could be anything from the color to dots of color that you see in the sky that make the shape of a chrysanthemum or a peony. Or they could be small rocket-type motors that are on the inside so they spin. You see the fireworks show that looks like a serpent in the sky, a bunch of serpents that are descending in the sky or whistles. Whatever we load inside that payload of whatever that pattern is, is what it looks like in the sky when it bursts in the air. So there's a lot of science that goes into it. The colors are made by various elements and metals and oxidizers and fuels that we utilize. And one of the easiest, visual example I can give you is take an iron bar and if you put that on a grinding wheel and you see the sparks that come off of that, they’re brownish-type gold sparks that will come off of that. And what you're doing when you put that iron bar onto the grinding wheel is you’re breaking down that bar into very small pieces, little bits of iron. And you're also heating it up. So when you heat up iron, you get a dark brown willow-type look. If you heat up copper, for example, you'll get a blue flame that comes out of that. It's made up of a lot of chemistry using very specific particle sizes of each chemical with specific purities and each metal that we work with. And then once we process that into those little tiny components that are called stars and they burn they'll give us the red peony or that gold glitter to purple chrysanthemum look in the sky. It's just that easy.

Jo Reed: It's just that simple.

Lauren Grucci: It's simple.

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Jo Reed: What drew you to go into the business? I know there's the family and there's the tradition, but what else drew you to wanting to be involved in fireworks?

Phil Grucci: I was addicted back when I remember my first fireworks show I went on. My dad and my grandfather and uncle and aunt and my grandmother, we used to produce the fireworks at Coney Island every Tuesday night during the summer. And every Wednesday night was Rockaway Playland. And at a very early age, I was about five years old, six years old, and this is the beauty of multigenerational family and being able to experience this is, I would go in the truck with my father early in the day to go out to the barge and my uncle and we would be out there with the crew. Sitting in the truck with dad driving to the site is the coolest thing in the world when you get out there on the barge and you’re part of the team. And then my grandfather would come around four o'clock in the afternoon and he’d take me off the barge. Obviously, I was way too young to go out on the ocean and shoot the show with the elders. So he would take me off the barge and we would go over to Gargiulo’s, a little Italian restaurant and wait for the barge to come around the corner, around the horn and come in front of Coney Island. And then we would go out onto the boardwalk and he'd have this radio that was about two-feet in length and half-a-foot in diameter with a five-foot antenna on it.

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And he'd be calling the barge, and for a young boy to be part of that and see the coolness of him communicating with my dad out on the barge and then the fireworks started. And then afterwards people would come all over the place from all around the boardwalk and they would basically rush my grandfather in, congratulate him on how the great the show was and that's very addictive. And that's the earliest I can remember. That's when I said this is what I want to do. And then, for formal education for my Bachelor’s Degree in Finance and I knew I was going to school at LIU to contribute to this family business. And I never looked back.

Jo Reed: And what about for you Lauren?

Lauren Grucci: My first show was in Hawaii. It was a little bit of a perk because it was in Hawaii but my first show was Fourth of July in Pearl Harbor. And before that when I was younger, it was still the same draw, kind of that camaraderie when you would go onsite. When we were younger and there wasn't any product onsite yet, my dad used to bring Christopher and I and we would see all of the men and women, the pyrotechnicians and everybody was friends. It's basically like our extended family when I was younger. These people were my family and still are. And that was always the draw for me was just the team aspect of it. And, you know, obviously at the end of the day when the show is over, there is kind of a rush that you get because there's so much work that does go into that you’re really proud. And it's also nice to hear the oooh’s and the ah’s, because people really do love it and that's why we do it.

Phil Grucci: As Lauren said, we do have many extended members of the family that we spend time with even after—well it's really never after the job is over because we’re always working. And the subject always turns to fireworks one way or another. Like I said, we have many people that are part of our team and that's what draws our pyrotechnicians to the program. It's not just the fireworks show. It's the friendships that they make when they're out there in the field.

Jo Reed: You know, it strikes me, and I could be wrong because I know nothing, but that the shift to computers would have been a pretty major change in the way you create your firework displays.

Phil Grucci: My generation saw our industry go from lighting the fireworks with a torch to pushing a button with a very crude, electrical system that looks like a bunch of light switches on a piece of wood, to working with laptop computers and the fireworks being fired automatically. And now we’re fully automated and wireless and firing off of GPS satellites and things like that. So the computer is giving us not only in the field side, obviously, and being able to display the fireworks shows and display on places we would never be able to do, obviously, with a torch. And it also, naturally, for everybody in business has done major things with project planning and financing and everything else that you need to run your business as a basis.

Lauren Grucci: And safety.

Phil Grucci: And safety, as well. That's a very good point Lauren. With the computer, we've eliminated any of the manual firing of fireworks, meaning going up to a mortar and lighting the fuse and taking three steps and crouching down; and that mortar, that shell comes flying out of the mortar at 400-feet-a-second. So now the pyrotechnicians are either with a manual console behind a protective shelter, or a computer system firing the program remotely. So it's provided us a great deal of additional safety.

Jo Reed: This is what I'm thinking about. The Brooklyn Bridge Centennial where we began this conversation, that would be pre-computer and it would require manual firing.

Phil Grucci: It was pre-computer by one year. We produce the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983. And a college buddy of mind, Scott Razzo, which is now our CFO, wrote a program in 1984 that assisted us in the choreography and all of the drawings that are necessary that come from the choreography to set the show up. And we premiered that at the South Street Seaport in 1984. And after that it was so wildly successful for us to be able to manage large performances and distribute the fireworks and the circuitry based on a more elaborate design, it was actually chosen as the system to use for the Statue of Liberty Centennial in 1986 which we collaborated with two other firework companies around the country. The computer we did it on back in 1984 had a 10 megabyte hard drive on it, just to give you a little tiny green monochromatic screen and a daisy wheel printer that we were printing off of.

Jo Reed: I's pre-computer, and it's the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial and you had people on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, people on the Manhattan side of the bridge, boats in the water and then people on the north side and the south side of the bridge. And you have to create a display that somehow, at certain points, will be able to focus on each individual quadrant there.

Phil Grucci: Well, the beauty of the fireworks in general, the aerial shells, they’re in 3D.

Jo Reed: Yeah, they are.

Phil Grucci: It's a spherical item. So when you display from multiple stages like barges that are in a linear format on the East River, for example, but they straddle the bridge both the north and south side of the bridge then from the aerial shells that are coming off of the barge anybody that's in the 360-degree arena has an opportunity to see the same show. Where it becomes 2-D is when you have the bridge itself, when you perform from underneath the roadway where you put the waterfall, if you remember that big, white cascade of a waterfall —

Jo Reed: How could I ever forget that waterfall? Are you kidding? That was extraordinary.

Phil Grucci: So something like that is very much dependent on where you are positioned for your point of view to see whether you’re looking at it perpendicular or you’re looking at in parallel, so you'll see a straight line, or you'll see the beautiful breast spread of the waterfall going over the entire 2000-foot East River. And then we also on that performance, we displayed off the top, and that was a very strong and fantastic memory that I have because we had to climb the necklace of the Brooklyn Bridge and climb up to the top and back then, the fall harnesses were a hemp rope that was wrapped around a belt basically. And climb up to the top, get up on top of this tower, and it's not very big and we were loading fireworks up there. It really became sobering to understand that you're on top of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Jo Reed: What do you think our attraction, people's attraction to fireworks are?

Lauren Grucci: I think there's a lot of things that go into it. Especially now because you know, you go to a show and you don't really know what you're going to see because it's not just aerial shells anymore. And the choreography, I think, to the music usually gets people. But it's always the finale. It's always the sound and the colors and just the sheer power of it, I think that people really appreciate and they look for.

Phil Grucci: I get a lot of pleasure out of looking at the audience because a fireworks display in its purity it's really that moment-- most all fireworks programs are free. So people come to those events, it's generally you come with your family and friends. And when that 20 minute, or 15, 20, 25 minute fireworks show is happening you turn around and you look at the faces of the audience and you could have an 80-year-old grandfather sitting next to a seven-year-old grandson. And the expression on their face is almost identical with the exception of maybe some wrinkles on the grandfather's face. The expression is that mouth open. It's a moment where they forget all the troubles that may have in their lives, and all the troubles that are happening in the world. And you could smell it, you could feel it, you could see it. It really touches all of the senses. It’s a beautiful time, when you could sit down and really enjoy a performance like that.

Jo Reed: I think that is a great place to leave it. Phil and Lauren thank you. Thank you for giving me your time so generously in this very busy season.

Phil Grucci: It's our pleasure. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Lauren Grucci: Enjoy your Fourth of July.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

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Jo Reed: That was President and CEO of Fireworks by Grucci, Phil Grucci, and pyrotechnician and photographer, Lauren Grucci. You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do. And leave us a rating on Apple if you like us, because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening, and have a safe and wonderful Fourth of July weekend.

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