EDITORIAL: Pageant is part of Laguna

It’s hard to believe that only a week (more or less) remains until the “big three” summer art festivals will close up shop. Another summer has come and will soon be gone in Laguna Beach.

The Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters will end Aug. 30, the Sawdust Festival and Art-A-Fair will have their last hurrah Aug. 31.

This Saturday, the Pageant holds its annual gala, with celebrities working a red carpet and some 2,600 guests who will also get the “red carpet” treatment with a private art show, Pageant performance and Tivoli Terrace feast.

This is a very special year for the Pageant, which turned 75. The “platinum” anniversary celebration actually started last summer, when the Festival of Arts attained that number. It’s been a year of big doings for the FOA/POM “” the “mother” of all the city’s art festivals and the anchor of Laguna Beach’s art community.

There have been parades through town, the Pageant of the Monsters (no word on whether this “haunted Pageant” will be repeated this year around Halloween, but we hope so), and extra efforts to educate the public about the origins of the art scene in Laguna.

This year, another big number will be achieved: The Laguna Art Museum will turn 90.

Laguna Beach has come a long way from the days when Coast Highway was a dirt road and a “greeter” stood out on it waving folks down.

The Pageant of the Masters, tableaux vivants that use people as props in life-sized art replicas, started out in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression as an adjunct to the Festival of Arts, which was designed to lift spirits and fatten wallets during a time of economic deprivation.

It not only helped lift Laguna Beach artists out of their financial depression, it put its stamp on the town and launched Laguna as an art mecca.

The Pageant of the Masters, with its superb portrayal of works of art that many have never seen, lets the work of many of the worlds’ artists live on in a super-sized format that awes and educates.

The art and craft of the Pageant is guarded like a state secret “” which indeed it is.

There have been efforts to move the Pageant out of Laguna Beach into a larger venue than the Irvine Bowl, but this city is not only the cradle of this art form “” it is uniquely qualified to keep it strong, with the many volunteers who come back year after year to create it.

The city of Laguna Beach is justifiably proud to be the home of such an art form that is so unmistakably Laguna Beach.