The Neon Cruise

I lucked out. Saturday night, my girlfriend and her two best friends were going out together to celebrate one of the girls' birthdays, but when one of them couldn't make it, I got to tag along. We ended up on the Neon Cruise through Los Angeles. They run it every Saturday night through the summer, June until the beginning of October and it always sells out. My girlfriend had made reservations but it was previously sold out so they ended up on the waiting list. The day before the cruise, Friday, they found out they had seats so it was a bummer that their friend couldn't go with them. You meet down at the Museum of Neon, which I had been to before, but had never been on the famed cruise. There is a wine and cheese reception beforehand, so you can mill around the museum, enjoying illuminated impressions of days past, or glowing glass of colored gas. The wine is an important element for the three hour journey. You'll be on the top level of a double decker convertible bus, so while you can dress your outside as warm as possible, you'll definitely need something to warm the insides as well. You may want to invest in a hip flask if you're going on the neon cruise. But the cruise, the cruise itself is like a journey through an LA that you can only wish existed to this day. It really shows us the history of this city from a different perspective; one of promise and entrepeneurship, something that has, in my opinion, been lacking in this city, in this country for the last decade. It feels like there was a desire for technology and excitement and entertainment to collide and create, above all, a better life for all. When the Packard dealership on Wilshire first introduced neon to America, the buzz it created was not only important to signage for years to come, but it obviously changed the way Americans were mesmerized. Eric, the smarmy, sarcastic, and incredibly funny, tour guide lead us through an intriguing history. When we reached Hollywood, he began to lament the introduction of "backlit plastic," the signage that effectively eliminated the need for neon signs. Cheap and economical, you can much more with a backlit plastic sign than you can with blown glass neon tubes, I understand what happened. But it made me think that it also changed the way we dealt with that blend of technology and entertainment. We added business. Now it wasn't about making people excited about something new any more. It was about getting them into a store, selling them something, and getting the next guy in the store. That's it. That's where we've come to and what is driving our country the argument of art versus business and whether the two are individuals or influencing to each other. Does one have to breed the other? Are the two allowed to live harmoniously? Or are we slashing our cities' wrists by making our advertisements bigger, louder, and brighter, and letting our distilled artistic impulses languish in smaller venues, collecting dust, decomposing, and running out of power? The neon cruise is something of wonder and excitement that helps us realize what things were and how things can be when people work together and appreciate ingenuity and experimentation, while requiring boundries. Like a delicate glass tube of exploding gas, a dedicated column on the periodic table of elements, sharp lines of brightly colored light that we can form in any way and to acheive any message, so long as the gas doesn't escape or the switch isn't turned off.