Fireworks, part one

First of all, no one was hurt in this entry. That is pretty amazing on the face of it. It is a questionable idea, in my opinion, to put gigantic fireworks warehouses right by the highway where anyone with a car and maybe a license can just tell themselves "Cool, fireworks!" and pull in and buy some. The mighty NDI never postured ourselves as deep-thinkers, or responsible, so it is extra-questionable to put gigantic fireworks warehouses on the highway right where we could see them in Charleston, West Virginia in 1991. This is right around the time we began to see some profits from our musical stylings. So in addition to eating at restaurants with names on the front, we also began investing in entertainment-grade explosives.
The first awesome idea we had came about after we found a deal on some very basic "bottle rocket" fireworks. These are just re-tooled firecrackers stuck onto a stick about a foot long, and instead of exploding they shoot up and into whatever is overhead, like powerlines or the ceiling. We found a deal on these little guys at a fireworks store that was really just a huge tent open all night and where we staggered in at about 4 in the morning after a massively loud dose of chaos at a club called The Hammered Miner (I think). We strolled along under the buzzy fluorescent lights and tried to find the most potential damage to fit our budget, which was about 5 dollars. We were about to give up when as luck would have it Skipper tripped over an infant and fell right up against a HUGE bargain, a pallet of these bottle rocket things for $2.99. It took two of us to lift it into the van.
Our first idea was to see if we could build one of those backpack lift-off thingies that guys have in spy movies. The answer to this was "NO," but it was completely awesome watching GT screaming and running around the parking lot looking like he had fire shooting out of his butt. We had to admit that, as usual, we were being waaaay too ambitious.
So the next idea was to turn our van into a space attack warship vehicle. For this all we needed was a van, which we had, some bottle rockets, which we had, and a roll of ducktape which we were pretty sure we had somewhere. GT emptied the entire van and swore a lot before we found it in the pocket of Skipper's tux coat.
Here's why we needed the ducktape: it seemed reasonable that we could fasten empty beverage bottles to our side mirrors in such a way that they faced forward, and then load them with rockets and fire them like missiles as we traveled the late-night back roads of rural West Virginia.
At this point in the story I need to have a quick consultation with a lawyer friend of mine. Hold on just one minute --

He says I should insert the url or Earl or whatever of a site I like: Junior High is COOL!