America doesn't believe Perego, a Daytona Beach artist, has got talent.

Snippety Piers Morgan, the Simon-Cowell-wanna-be judge on the TV show "America's Got Talent," doesn't believe it either. Ditto the show's other two judges, Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandel.

America, if you had been hunkered down in the chilly, late-winter air in the patio-alley behind the Daytona Beach club Tir Na Nog two years ago, you'd know: Perego's got talent.

Never mind that Perego and his sometime partner in art crimes, Orlando break dancer Heps Fury, tanked when they appeared a few weeks ago on "America's Got Talent." They were unceremoniously buzzed offstage after less than a minute (although their segment likely was edited for broadcast).

For years now, Perego has been staging Vagabond Art Parties in various local venues -- unrehearsed, live mash-ups of performance art, music, deejay sets, spoken word and exhibitions of painting and sculpture . . . all created by what Perego calls the Art Army. The Art Army, it turns out, can be any and all area creative types who get a buzz doing their thing in a public forum.

A highlight of the Vagabond Art Parties has always been Perego's paint sloshing, sometimes solo and sometimes with Heps Fury -- who becomes a break-dancing human paintbrush.

That night at Tir Na Nog, I and dozens of others huddled in the chill wind watched as Perego approached a mural-sized canvas. He moved as if both he and the canvas were Komodo dragons dueling for the attentions of the same lady Komodo.

As Jimi Hendrix music blasted from the sound system, Perego began to dip his brush into various cans of paint. He darted back and forth at the canvas, paint flying like a mini meteor shower.

If someone had told me earlier that I'd be watching a guy paint, I would have been as thrilled as watching Uncle Mason paste postage stamps into his collection book. But this dancing, darting, jousting guy had become a performance artist as well as a painter.

With the music of Hendrix providing a ritualistic incantation, the image on Perego's canvas began to materialize slowly, like some ghost at a Victorian séance. Then, voila! There he was -- the rock god himself. Perego had painted that iconic scene of Hendrix at Monterey, kneeling over his prone guitar, sacrificing it in flames.

Then Perego "signed" his work by dipping his long, dread-locked strands of hair in paint and whipping his head toward the canvas.

Then Perego delivered his coup de grace: He took a small lit torch and touched it to his canvas, and the painted guitar burst into flames. He stepped back as his painted Jimi continued to kneel in fealty to his flaming sacrificed guitar.

At later Vagabond Art Parties I witnessed Perego team up with Heps. Sometimes the duo sloshed paint on a flat canvas, with Heps then performing amazing break-dancing moves on the canvas -- maneuvers that would make Jackson Pollock salivate like Pavlov's dog.

Sometimes Perego would man a projector to create his "organic lightshow" on a wall while Heps breaked furiously around the moving, psychedelic image.

For their "America's Got Talent" segment, Perego and Heps decided to do the organic lightshow thing.

"Why didn't I paint?" Perego wrote in an e-mail to me and other fans of his. "Well, we were told that there were many painters, but not one in 70,000 doing anything like my lightshow, so we planned to start with that for the 'original' factor.

"We had eight different shows planned using paint, dance and the lights in various combos. We requested for it to be as dark as it could be and as large of a screen as they could do .¤.¤. they gave us THAT? And I was in way too of a 'cooperative' mood to be demanding of the way I needed it to be (lesson well learned) and it didn't rock."

Part of that lesson to be learned, I suspect, is that shows like "America's Got Talent" and "American Idol" depend on a certain number of patsies to be the butt of the judges', and America's, derision, and the creators of such shows won't hesitate to manipulate the process to create those patsies. Did "Idol's" William Hung really deserve any face time on national television?

True, Perego and Heps' segment didn't rock (you can view the segment on YouTube). But I imagine that Perego's performance art likely will never translate well onto antiseptic, in-a-studio, big network television. (However, guerilla filmmaking is a different story -- see Chris Hansen's film of Perego's Hendrix piece, also on YouTube).

Too bad Piers Morgan, Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandell weren't huddled with me and other Perego fans that chilly winter night behind Tir Na Nog. That rocked. Perego's got talent.