Chad Lundquist/Nevada Appeal Lead pyrotechnician Chip Sigafoos lights a fireworks primer cord Sunday to show how fast it burns, 600 feet per second.
For many of those behind the scenes, it will be a continuation of antics from a time when playthings packed a lot more pop.
"It started with firecrackers and moved on to M-80s packed in mud and stuck to a wall," said Chip Sigafoos, a sign shop manager in Las Vegas who works part-time setting up shows for Lantis Fireworks and Lasers.
With fireworks available to the average consumer at roadside stands becoming ever more safe and coincidentally less explosive, Generation X will likely be the last in which most people have at least one acquaintance with a partially missing digit due to Fourth of July fun. It's the nature of children to push the bounds and experiment with anything that explodes - it's the nature of some adults, too.
"If I could do this all the time, I'd do it," Sigafoos said. "This blows my other job away," he added, at first missing the pun.
His work-mate, Shirlene Utterback, took on the seasonal job about seven or eight years ago. For most of the year, she's an active parent who helps do makeup and costumes for school plays.
The fireworks are a diversion that's a little more, well, explosive.
"Every show has a story, and that's what makes it interesting," she said.
An added bonus is that her two children get several chances a year to see shows.
And the shows aren't the roadside stand fare, either.
Tonight at around 8:30 p.m., for instance, Sigafoos and Utterback will be setting off 500 to 600 rounds of 3- to 12-inch shells containing all manner of ingredients like sulfur titanium, gunpowder and myriad aluminums.
It's far more grand than cherry bomb in the toilet, and also safe and legal.
The $15,000, 10-minute show put on by the nonprofit group Rural Counties Retired and Seniors Volunteer Program, is free. The best seats in town are at Mills Park.
n Contact reporter Cory McConnell at cmcconnell@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1217.