Pageant of the Masters: Frozen Fun on a Warm Evening

Ultimate Challenge sculpture, Huntington Beach, CA

What do Arrested Development and Gilmore Girls have in common with the artsy seaside community of Laguna Beach, California? Episodes of these two well-loved TV series have borrowed from Laguna Beach the concept of a pageant in which live performers pose, frozen in place, to simulate famous works of art. 

These tableaux vivants (or “living pictures”) are an old-fashioned idea, from the days well before TV and movies, when entertainment needed to be simpler and more home-grown. I remember from my girlhood a sweet scene in Louisa May Alcott’s 1880 novel, Jack and Jill, in which the novel’s main characters posed as characters from American history, culminating in one young fellow impersonating Daniel Chester French’s famous statue, The Minuteman. But the impulse to mimic sacred works of painting and sculpture can be traced back to the Medieval church. And, centuries later, titillating shows like the Ziegfeld Follies enjoyed turning semi-draped young women into living sculpture.

Enough history lesson! Laguna’s so-called Pageant of the Masters, which has been around since 1933, is a triumph of community spirit. Hundreds of local volunteers, under the direction of a small and devoted paid staff, gather each summer for eight weeks of posing in the name of art appreciation. And a quarter of a million viewers gather in comfortable outdoor surroundings to marvel at what costumes, lighting, stage sets, and deep dedication can do. A lively narration, a few dancers, some gimmickry. and a live orchestra playing appropriate tunes add much-needed pizzazz: there is only so long you can marvel at living paintings before you start wanting SOMETHING to break up the stillness.

The 2018 theme is “Under the Sun,” featuring works of art set in natural surroundings. Some are by true masters like Monet and Gauguin: the Laguna folks ably reproduce impressionistic oil paintings set in Giverny and Tahiti. But this year’s pageant also salutes artists closer to home, including a few twentieth-century plein air painters who were involved in the festival’s founding. There are also some imaginative touches, like reproductions of those enticing California citrus labels, with their Indian maidens and bathing beauties on full display. Just for fun, this scene is punctuated by giant plastic “oranges” that bounce across the stage, to the crowd’s delight.

My favorite section, though,  focuses on one of California’s favorite outdoor sports: surfing. The orchestra strikes up a Beach Boys tune, and skateboarders whiz through the Irvine Bowl as a prelude to the curtain opening upon an ocean vista. Video projections (much used throughout the pageant to enhance our sense of nature’s majesty) here bring us the crash of ocean waves—waves much like those real ones a short walk away, just off the Laguna strand. But the highlight, of course, is the reproduction of a painting. It features a young man in an impossible pose, not moving a muscle while he crouches on his board, the surf spraying up behind him as he barely avoids a wipeout.

Several minutes later, there’s the depiction of another work of art featuring a surfer. This is Edmund Shumpert’s bronze statue, “Ultimate Challenge,” which immortalizes an iconic male figure riding a curl. The original stands in nearby Huntington Beach, which has officially dubbed itself Surf City U.S.A. The figure on the stage has been made up to look like bronze; somehow invisibly strapped to his board, he slowly turns on a revolving platform to give the audience the chance to see him in the round. His thighs must be silently screaming, but it’s a gnarly sight. Better, I’m sure, than George-Michael Bluth posing as Michelangelo’s Adam in the (almost) altogether. 

Poster featuring a local posing as a surfer

Rance and Ron Howard: Oklahoma’s Resilient Native Sons

Oscar Hammerstein had it right: Oklahoma’s a place where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain. We’ve all seen the photos coming out of Moore, Oklahoma. It was flattened last week by a EF5 tornado, which sent winds of 210 mph barreling across a stretch of prairie three miles wide and seventeen miles long. Twenty-four people died, including ten children.

But we’ve also been hearing about the resilient folk who make Oklahoma their home. They’re hard-working and plain-spoken. They may not be as picturesque as the farmers and the cowhands in Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical, but their can-do spirit helps them survive disasters without hysteria. Which makes it fitting indeed that Ron Howard is Oklahoma-born.

Ron Howard seems to have led a charmed life. He made his professional acting debut at age five. When he was six, The Andy Griffith Show made him a star. He passed through his awkward teen years without much harm done, and at twenty he starred in his second hit TV series, Happy Days. When he was twenty-three he fulfilled a lifelong dream by directing his first film, Grand Theft Auto. Quickly leaving B-movies behind, he helmed such Hollywood hits as Splash, Cocoon¸ and Parenthood. Apollo 13 brought him critical respect, and A Beautiful Mind brought him two Oscars. Today, as both director and producer, he has a full slate. Most recently, he’s continued his involvement with Arrested Development, for which he serves as executive producer, while also reprising his deadpan narrator’s role and playing himself on-camera. Great careers don’t just happen. Sure, there’s luck involved, but also hard work, as well as an ability to shrug off disappointments and keep moving forward.  

Everyone who has worked with Ron Howard speaks of his common sense and his ability to remain down-to-earth while wielding serious show biz clout. And everyone credits his parents, Rance and Jean, for molding him into the man he has become. The effervescent Jean Speegle was a star in Duncan, Oklahoma, population 22,000. She served as editor-in-chief of her high school yearbook and was elected student council president. After graduating, she was accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. On February 10, 1947, Jean left a dance class and stepped into the path of a speeding truck. The result: a brain concussion, a broken arm and shoulder, and a pelvis shattered in three places. She lay unconscious for ten days in a New York hospital. At last she was put on a train for Oklahoma, where doctors warned her worried family she might never walk again. But Jean, always a fighter, beat the odds.

Studying drama at the University of Oklahoma, she met a country boy who had walked off the family farm with the dream of becoming an actor. Their courtship took place during a bus-and-truck tour with a children’s theatre troupe. (Rance would get down on his knees and add a fake beard to play one of Snow White’s dwarves.) Not long after the birth of Ronald William Howard, they moved to New York and then Southern California, in pursuit of acting careers. Their young son would far outstrip them both in terms of Hollywood fame and fortune. But they lived on Rance’s earnings as a character actor and worked hard to keep their small star a regular boy. Heart disease claimed Jean far too soon, but Rance continues to take on small but meaty roles at age eighty-five. He’s a survivor, and a credit to his Oklahoma roots, those roots that hold fast even when life seems to be blowing in the wind.