Like the Sirens, these sculptures at the Pageant of the Masters from 1983, er, 2014 will put you a catatonic state with their beauty.

The nightmare could not have been more real: a sea of aging upper-middle class suburbanites with plentiful purses, perusing and meandering mini-gallery after mini-gallery of abstract expressionist sculpture that would have been radical in ’84 and landscapes that would put Thomas Kinkade to absolute shame (while simultaneously making Bob Ross proud).

Yes, I went through—and survived—Orange County’s Pageant of the Masters.

I lived part of my life in Orange County, a mistake of naiveté given I was perched on a mountain top for the entirety of my childhood and knew nothing of the Orange Curtain that divided suburbia from urbanism.

Anyone knows this fact once they escape the County of Orange: much like Stockholm Syndrome, it isn’t until you leave its grip do you realize how suffocating it all really was. Even at an educational institution like Cal State Fullerton or UCI, one becomes comfortable with the concept that anything old = bad and anything new and shiny = good and that homogeneity on every level (besides the boy-on-boy kind) rules with its RVCA hammer. It’s much like a great professor at Fullerton once told me, “Why is the title of this course, ‘The History of Orange County,’ a conundrum? Because Orange County is ahistorical.”

In this sense, the Pageant of the Masters makes perfect sense. Tucked far, far away from pesky poor people and the marginalized, the solipsistic denizens of OC get to enjoy the PoM in a safe space carved into a Laguna Beach hillside. There, they enjoy the world’s largest collection of pointless and tacky wall and floor decorations (minus, of course, the handful of pictures of Brazilian favelas that weren’t necessarily great objectively but due to their placement in the Dead Sea offered a brilliant juxtaposition, particularly when contrasted against blue hair bobbling beneath it).

But these lower art forms weren’t the highlight. Sadly, the Goebel-like figurines of an elderly white couple in a variety of McCarthy-era vehicles (the wife’s adorable red-dye hairdo obvi makes it high-larious and perfect for the collectibles hutch) came in at third place at best. The tiles with nature’s finest trees that would only be found at the most sophisticated Holiday Inn (not that Express shit, but the Suites) barely scratched the top ten. The metal sculpture worthy of the lawn of Chipotle’s head offices? No, they did not make it to the top, only into the home of Jenna Jameson.

The highlight is something only OC could achieve.

You herd into a Hollywood Bowl-like amphitheater—a quarter the size, but all the heart of a really swell Christian summer camp—and you sit to watch… Recreated paintings. Re. Created. Paintings. But these aren’t just your average Joe Manets and Monets painting paintings with their boring canvases and paintbrushes and that hippie crap.

No, dear Starbucks, no. PoM is even better than the so-not-trill real paintings. PoM is, dare I say, even better than the limited lithographs.

In fact, PoM does the impossible: they re-create the paintings… with people. It is unfortunate pictures were not allowed but understandable given the organizers don’t want anyone from the outside world to see something they’ve never seen before besides in every history text book known to man or, even worse, for the people on stage to become faded because your camera flash. I challenge you to bring your binoculars and attempt to tell the difference between the paintings recreated on stage versus the painting on your HD monitor (except with the latter you can zoom in and explore context and stare for at it as long as you want and all that artsy bullshit). I mean, it’s truly mind blowing: they do not move. Even a centimeter. It’s like the Silver Man human statue in San Francisco but, like, paintings, man.

To top it all off, a pseudo-narrative bashing on those art-stealing Nazi bastards was provided to explain the background of each piece (which included a little tidbit about Charles Dickens and his empathetic view of the poor—of course, minus any mention of his distaste for Jews and how he blamed the Jews for the poor English population but we’re not here for that kind of reality, we’re here for The Masters).

There’s movements in the arts, right? We have Van Gogh, giving a big middle finger to the past and, inspired by  Impressionism, moved forward. We have Picasso, saying au re-flippin’-voir to Renaissance perspective and depth and feel. Dali going into dreams. Warhol going into cultural critique. Basquiat going into the vulgar.

How can these artists compete, though, after PoM? After all, much like the Main Street at Disneyland, why go through the troubles of experiencing actual Main Street—there might be trash!—when you can have the dream world of Perfection? Traveling to the Getty means traveling through… Neighborhoods. And by neighborhoods, I mean poor neighborhoods anywhere above the 5 Freeway at La Mirada. The struggle is real and for many, the thought of seeing more Hondas than Mercedes can result in a disastrous existential dilemma, possibly leading to excessive Xanax intake and extra margaritas at Javiers upon return to the Haven of Orange.

After going through the full program of The Masters (of which they unfortunately had a handful of Peasants, including a Hockney from 1972 and some movie posters from the 30s and 40s, that ruined it almost entirely for my Masters-only experience), they ended with the pinnacle, the show-stopper, the Master of the Masters: Da Vinci. Okay, no, not the Mona Lisa but the other Da Vinci masterpiece: The Last Supper. 

This is, of course, not to downsize the talent of those remaining perfectly still or the insane talent of the stage lighters (who create the real magic). And that’s not me being facetious. But let’s be frank here: only in Orange County would thousands upon thousands enjoy watching a version of something that already exists recreated just for them.

Personally, this is my kind of Last Supper: