Published: June 27, 2009 11:46 pm         

Area man lights up the sky on the 4th

CARRIER (AP) — Gary Caimano easily can fill the canvas of night sky with his palette of exploding lights.

Setting it to music is a challenge that’s kept his enthusiasm high for 35 years.

“People love fireworks. They’re mesmerized by it, and then you give them an emotional sensory experience with music, and you interpret things and give them drama on a giant stage. It just moves them,” said Caimano, director of marketing and choreographer of shows for Western Enterprises Inc. in Carrier.

“I look at every single shell as though it were a dramatic persona,” he said. “I get excited because I think of the audience, the people who are going to witness this. On that day, they want a show to represent their freedom. They deserve the best show I can give them.”

Western, which makes most of its own pyrotechnics, puts on more than 600 fireworks shows annually in Oklahoma and surrounding states. Clients have included Tink-er Air Force Base; Bricktown; Red-Hawks; Riverwind Casino; and municipalities of Enid, Oklahoma City, Moore and Norman.

Most of the shows are held around July 4. Caimano spends weeks choreographing those performances well before the holiday so Western’s employees have time to set up, secure permits and handle numerous other concerns.

“It’s a six-month operation to get the Fourth of July up and running,” he said. “And as soon as that ends, you’re doing Labor Day and then Christmas and New Year’s Eve shows. It’s constant.”

Caimano grew up in one of the nation’s original fireworks families, Zambelli Internationale in Pennsylvania. When he was 5 years old, Caimano’s father died in a manufacturing explosion; his mother forbade Caimano from working in the industry. But after studying theater and earning his master’s degree in literature, he came back.

“I have an inherent love to seeing something perform to music,” he said. “And it wasn’t something that was done back in the ’70s. Fireworks shows were simple and noisy and beautiful, but it was a different genre back then.”

That changed when he orchestrated the country’s first “pyro-musical” in 1974 in Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.

The response was phenomenal, he said, and opened the way to decades of artistry.

He’s been an Oklahoman since 1998 and now lives in Enid. Caimano deals with programmed shows while Chief Executive James V. Burnett handles all the live symphonies. Caimano gave his boss high marks for style; they spend hours designing performances.

Because he had specific ideas to express, Caimano became more involved in designing and buying materials to match his vision. For example, if he needs a blue-to-red-to-silver willow, a full burst with drooping plumes like a willow tree, it’s made for him in the offseason.

Shows usually are simulcast on radio stations so Caimano’s task of coordinating sound and light speeds is less of a problem. Fire-works shells can be timed to break within a time of milliseconds.

“It’s all very intense,” he said. “You have to put everything in time to the music; you have to back-time it so the flight of the shell is taken into consideration; and the emotion you’re evoking,” he said.

“You can take Ray Charles’ rendition of America and when he sings ’from sea to shining sea’ at the end with a big crescendo, you fill the sky with blue and it moves like the ocean. The audience feels that emotion.

“When you finish a script, you realize you’ve made seven or eight design statements in a 20-minute show. It’s very satisfying.”