It’s 3 p.m. Saturday, and the reception...

It’s 3 p.m. Saturday, and the reception for the “L.A. Drives Me Wild” art exhibit is about to begin at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 1440 9th St., Santa Monica, and we’re talking to . . . a young lady, I guess you’d say . . . who didn’t get invited. Could you give us your name, please?

A: Christine.

Q: Right. And you’re protesting your exclusion from this exhibit, which runs through Sept. 5 and, according to the brochure, “explores our love-hate relationship with cars”?

A: Discrimination, that’s what it is.

Q: How so?

A: Just because I’m an American car, they think I don’t have star quality. Well, let me tell ya, buster, I’ll match push rods with their double overhead cams any day. I bet their tail fins are silicone. Lemme in there and I’ll show ‘em what a Detroit gal can do. . . . Say, are you peekin’ down my grille?

Q: Er, of course not, Miss, Ms. . . . though I was admiring that lovely candy-apple paint job.

A: You oughta see my manifolds.

Q: Yes. Anyway, your protest . . .

A: This is California, and all they go for are these tangerine-flake crazies. Frank Romero’s low-riders, Sy Edelstein’s car masks, Dustin Schuler’s car skins, Jane Gottlieb’s Cibachrome dream machines, Richard Gerrish’s stacked-up new cars passin’ stacked-up wrecks, Steve Lapin’s cars divin’ into pools, Richard Gerrish’s Los Angeles Urban Assault Mobile, Richard Pietruska’s and Keith Collins’ tapestries of movie cars like the Batmobile, Margaret Carr’s cars that wear clothes, for Pete’s sake, and Camille Chang’s cars dipped in chocolate! What’s a little ol’ ‘58 Plymouth gonna do?

Q: Wait a minute. The Batmobile! Weren’t you . . . in a movie too?

A: Yep.

Q: Stephen King’s story about a junked car that grows sleek and shiny on a diet of human blood? That ravening creature out of a chrome-plated nightmare? That nail through the steel-belted radial of our civilization? That . . .

A. Want my autograph, sweetie?

Q: No wonder they wouldn’t let you in.

A: Oh, yeah? What about all these other guys? Don’t they cause smog and the greenhouse effect? Don’t they gobble up farmland and fossil fuels? What’s a little human blood? Bats drink it too. Next time you ask that super-hero in the mask and the cape what he uses for cocktail sauce. . . . Hey, buster, don’t back off. I’m not finished.

Q: But I am. The point, Ms. Christine, is who this city belongs to. Who has the rights here--people or machines?

A: Well?