Laguna Beach dining?

[Ghoulish Delight]

Thanks for all the advice...we ignored it all :P

So as we walked (ran?) out the door, it dawned on us to glance at the info paper that came with the tickets. It mentioned that there's a restaurant IN the festival area. That seemed like a good idea to us so we called and got reservations, and they reassured us that even if traffic sucked and we didn't get in until 7:30 we'd have no problem getting dinner and making the show.

Traffic did, in fact, NOT suck. 30 minutes to get down there with nary a slowdown on the 133. But downtown was definitely packed and after a cursory drive through, it appeared all the free parking was taken. Rather tha take our chances circling, we bit the bullet and paid the $10 to park in a lot across from the festival.

We got in an headed for the restaurant, but on the way we spotted a window service food place also. Having just sped past a bunch of awesome art to try to get to our reservations, we decided that it made more sense to just grab a quick bite at the window service and spend the time we would have been spending waiting for a check wandering the festival instead.

Right decision! The food was just fine (and saved us some $) and we had a ton of time to see the art, which was great. Even spotted a few artists we'd seen exhibited elsewhere which was cool.

As for the Pageant itself, as awesome as advertised.
(spoilerized for anyone who might still consider attending)

Spoiler:

The theme was "The Muse", and they did a really fabulous job with it, telling excellent stories about the people behind the art. And it can't be said enough how astounding the artistry of these pieces are, a favorite being a huge, human-sized, reproduction of a Lalique art nouveau dragonfly brooch.

One complaint was their attempt at "humor". The few jokes sprinkled through the narration wouldn't have been so bad (though the Sarah Palin joke I could have done without period), but there was a section that just went WAY too far into classless. It could have been so awesome, they were doing some classic "beauty and the beast" genre movie poster lithos. Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, one of the Tarzan flicks, and of coures King Kong. Made to sell the "low arts", these posters are truly work of arts and it was great to see them in the same context as the masterworks.

But for some reason they decided to go lowbrow with the presentation. The narration was full of the WORST puns. I refuse to try to recall them, they were so bad. As the people in the Tarzan poster stood in their world class makeup and perfect poses, we had to endure a recorded Tarzan call and someone swinging lamely across the stage. But the worst of it was when, above the prescenium arose King Kong! No, sorry, arose a car dealership inflatible ape!!! So awful, so classelss. Ugh.

But oh well. It was just one short section in an otherwise amazing presentation.

So after the show we spent another 15 minutes seeing the last few exhibits we hadn't gotten to beforehand. And then, instead of joining the line of cars on the 133, we took a walk down to the beach and back to see the moon reflecting perfectly off the water. All in all a fantastic Friday night.