Yeah, this is another piece about the Seattle mayoral election, whose primary round is three weeks away as of today.

Specifically, it’s about a very strange event last night at A Contemporary Theatre, a performance-art circus billed as a candidates’ forum on arts and cultural issues. How strange was it? KIRO-TV news guy Mike James was overheard saying, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

It started normally enough, with 50 or so protesters staging a sit-in in front of ACT, criticizing city attorney/mayoral candidate Mark Sidran’s “civility laws,” including his ban on sitting on city sidewalks.

But the event inside got off-script once fringe candidate Richard Lee (producer-host of the cable access show Kurt Cobain Was Murdered) stepped on stage, wearing a dress and holding a video camcorder aimed at his own face.

For the next two hours, no matter what question the moderator (James’s former KING colleague Lori Matsukawa) asked, Lee spent his alloted minutes and longer repeating the same rant–that he has supposed proof that Cobain was assassinated (or at least might have been), that city and county officials (including the three candidates at the forum currently in government employ) are involved in a cover-up conspiracy, and that anyone who declines to play along with his verbal attacks is also part of the conspiracy.

In one evening of tiresome theatrics, Lee destroyed any remaining credibility in himself or his “crusade.”

Worse, he made Sidran look sane.

Notwithstanding Lee’s histrionics, the forum’s other six candidates also frequently strayed from the questions at hand, into pre-prepared hype statements.

Sidran, smug and grating as ever, made his usual buzzwords about “civility” and “strong leadership.” His answer to a question about high housing costs pushing artists and arts groups out of town: Give more “incentives” (read: subsidies) to private developers, and improve the highways so it would be easier to push the non-wealthy out to Kent and Shoreline.

Incumbent Paul Schell and front-running challenger Greg Nickels made nearly identical, nearly meaningless smooth talk about supporting the arts as harbingers of cultural diversity in a cosmopolitan city at the dawn of a new millennium and so forth. The big difference between the two: Schell defended his veto of changes to the hated Teen Dance Ordinance, while Nickels called for new initiatives to promote safe live shows for under-21s.

Omari Tahir-Garrett, out on bail after charged with hitting Schell with a megaphone in July, repeatedly brought every response back to a call to recognize the problems of minorities, especially minority youth. Such statements, by themselves, would’ve been good toward reclaiming his credibility within the Af-Am community–but he usually segued straight from that line into his personal cause, the proposed African American Academy project that’s been years in the making and was taken out of his hands.

(This is an admittedly incomplete telling of what’s really a long story. Tahir-Garrett’s career, and his relationship within local black leadership, is much more complicated than that.)

Scott Kennedy, one of the two liberal-progressives in the race, showed up late and kept promoting his non-politician status. He insisted that as a small businessman, a rock musician, and a friend and colleage of artists and arts organizers, he’d be more sympathetic to the arts than other candidates, but didn’t specifically propose much on their behalf.

Charlie Chong, the race’s other left-of-center guy, was soft-spoken and down-to-earth, and stayed the closest to the topics of Matsukawa’s questions. Then, in his closing statement, he called himself an “anti-establishment candidate,” humorously said that a Seattle under Sidran would be like a Stephen King horror movie and a Seattle under Nickels would be like “four years of Bonanza reruns” (a probable reference to The Stranger nicknaming Nickels “Hoss” during the 1997 election), and apparently offerred his support to Schell, whom Chong fought hard against in ’97.

Yes, things can get weirder still. And they probably will.