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Let's give it up for Lady America.
The Wonder Wheel is a grand old Ferris Wheel out on Luna Park in Coney Island, the best in New York City. It's tall, and built to last, and rises up out of the rest of the park as the main attraction, the central feature, and walking towards it with the sunset behind, it really is the stuff tourism campaigns are built on. Tonight could have been on postcards, for all the sunset had to offer - pinks behind the clouds running jagged blue - and all the lights of the park with the day not yet gone but far enough away to whisper night had almost arrived, all the lights of the park standing bright to keep their colors and keep the strangeness and tender unreality standing through.
Also of note about the Wonder Wheel is it has stationary cars that move as the Wheel turns, and rocking cars that shift back and forth on runners when the Wheel stops and momentum kicks in. Rising up to see the park spreading out beneath you, unfolding and unfurling as the wheel slowly carries you is a quiet delight, something to hold gently. The moments the Wheel stops and the car swings out past its edge with nothing but the window of the car between you and the sky - they're quite thrilling. And if you're lucky enough to swing forward when the fireworks at the nearby baseball park are in full bursting bloom, there's nothing else like it. My family wouldn't have gotten to see that if we hadn't been so late getting going in the morning, getting held up at dinner, and waiting in line for quite so long. We did, though, and when we rode up as the sunset disappeared underneath the city skyline, and the ocean and sky darkened, and the fireworks were a matching piece of unreality to the park beneath us - when we rocked forward and for a moment were going to fly out and join them, just a moment but a rich one. The sky was dark, the air was cold, and the lights were hit. The light of day became the lights of the night, and Luna Park carried us from one into the other without noticing - sometime between stepping on and off, the phantasmagoria of the park holding us afloat and alight until we left it to return to the world.
Also of note about the Wonder Wheel is it has stationary cars that move as the Wheel turns, and rocking cars that shift back and forth on runners when the Wheel stops and momentum kicks in. Rising up to see the park spreading out beneath you, unfolding and unfurling as the wheel slowly carries you is a quiet delight, something to hold gently. The moments the Wheel stops and the car swings out past its edge with nothing but the window of the car between you and the sky - they're quite thrilling. And if you're lucky enough to swing forward when the fireworks at the nearby baseball park are in full bursting bloom, there's nothing else like it. My family wouldn't have gotten to see that if we hadn't been so late getting going in the morning, getting held up at dinner, and waiting in line for quite so long. We did, though, and when we rode up as the sunset disappeared underneath the city skyline, and the ocean and sky darkened, and the fireworks were a matching piece of unreality to the park beneath us - when we rocked forward and for a moment were going to fly out and join them, just a moment but a rich one. The sky was dark, the air was cold, and the lights were hit. The light of day became the lights of the night, and Luna Park carried us from one into the other without noticing - sometime between stepping on and off, the phantasmagoria of the park holding us afloat and alight until we left it to return to the world.