‘Not All Fun and Games’ : Entertainment: Performers on the Third Street Promenade have to put up with cutthroat competition, rude patrons and, perhaps, new city regulations.

Escape artist Mathew Cooper was having a miserable night on the Third Street Promenade.

Another street performer had taken his preferred spot. Even worse, the interloper was also doing an escape act. People walked by Cooper without interest.

“What am I going to have to do, offer free well water?” he yelled. No one stopped. Disgusted, Cooper threw his chains and straitjacket back into his box, donned a black leather jacket, rolled up his rug and stomped off into the night, pulling his box behind him.

Performing on the Promenade, Santa Monica’s thriving entertainment mecca, is not for the faint of heart. It is “extremely competitive, practically cutthroat,” says Cooper, who has been working the three-block pedestrian mall for about two years.

Sometimes the audience can be a bigger problem than the other performers.

“Women grab me. They grab my rear. They think I’m a doll or something,” said Kathryn Mora, who becomes Katrina the Clown on the Promenade. She wears a flaming red wig with ponytails, a green-yellow-and-orange striped suit, oversized white shoes and a black bowler hat with a plethora of flowers springing skyward.

“This one guy grabbed my rear and just held on. It’s very upsetting. It’s an assault,” she said. “Usually they don’t hold on. They just want to make it a quick thing.”

Then there was the night some guy sneaked up behind her and tried to rip her hat off. Which caused something of a problem because the hat is attached to her wig. “He could have ripped my whole scalp off,” she said.

Street performing “is just not all fun and games,” Mora said. “You’ve got to watch around you. You have to know what’s going on every minute while staying in character.”

For all the hassles, Mora keeps coming back to take her spot along the Promenade as one of the dozens of clowns, magicians, comedians, musicians and other entertainers who toil, day and night, especially on weekends.

“It’s a place to grow as a performer,” she said. “Number one, it’s fun--it’s really fun.”

To city officials and merchants, the performers have become an essential component of the Promenade landscape.

“Some of these performers are generating crowds of 200,” said Darrell George, Santa Monica’s economic development manager. “During the summer months, it’s like a wall of people.”

One such crowd gathered on a recent evening around Majestyk, a magician. He beckoned to a small boy in the throng and handed him a green bucket. As the youngster slowly circled with it, in search of tips, Majestyk made a promise: If he could not free himself from a straitjacket in two minutes, the boy could keep the tips.

With the promise made, the show was on. The crowd watched intently as Majestyk flung himself to the ground, writhing. Jerking his body upward, he shook his arms hard from side to side. A few more shakes and twists and he was free--in just less than two minutes.

As the sound of six Ecuadoran-Indian musicians playing drums, guitars and flutes drifted through the chill night air, Majestyk reached into the bucket, pulled out a dollar and handed it to the boy. By night’s end, Majestyk had made $170.

In theory, a short list of rules governs Promenade performers.

No one is supposed to occupy a spot for more half an hour. This is designed to prevent the hogging of prime spots--such as near Santa Monica Place or the center of the strip.

On the forbidden list are amplified music, boomboxes, chain saws, swords, torches and acrobatic acts.

No performances are allowed after midnight Fridays and Saturdays or 10:30 p.m. on other nights. After all, people actually live on the upper floors of some Promenade buildings. Performances also are banned before 11 a.m. and from 2 to 5 p.m. on weekdays.

Majestyk says that enforcement of the half-hour rule has been “kind of wish-washy.” Some regulars, he says, have developed a way to comply with the rule while still keeping choice spots: Throughout the night they simply swap places with each other.

In recent months, according to George, sentiment has been growing among Promenade restaurant owners that tighter regulation is needed.

Although the restaurateurs and other merchants seem generally to agree that the performers add to the ambience, they are concerned about crowd size and the fact that they sometimes lose outdoor diners to bad acts.

“We want them out there,” said Tony Palermo, owner of Teasers restaurant and head of the Bayside District Restaurant Assn. “But when it gets to accordion players who know just one song, it’s kind of funny at first, but after 45 minutes it’s like a bad joke.”

Sometimes, Palermo said, customers actually pay bad acts to go away.

Mostly, however, “the street performers are very good,” he said. “If they’re good, you want them around. There are some jazz bands that are phenomenal.”

Among the new regulations being considered, George said, are establishing a limited number of specific performance locations on the Promenade, and requiring performers to obtain city permits. An annual permit fee of $100 to $125 has been suggested, he said. If the permit system were implemented, George said, the city would be able to punish chronic rule-breakers by revoking the permit.

The new guidelines are expected to go before the city council Dec. 15.

“We don’t want to drive the performers away,” George said. “We just want to find a workable solution where everyone wins.”