COLUMN ONE : Don’t Tell Them They Can’t Win : The L.A. mayoral race is wide open with about 40 candidates. Most don’t have a prayer. Some have bizarre ideas for improving the city and many have no funds. What makes them run?

This is a city in search of a new leader and Laurence Greenblatt--a.k.a. Melrose Larry Green--has heard the call. He straps on his pink fanny pack and heads for the corner of Melrose and Highland.

The trunk of his four-door white Plymouth is stocked with big white signs informing the rush-hour traffic that he--a tax return preparer recently arrested for screaming and waving a Cajun fried fish at the Santa Monica Pier--should be mayor of the nation’s second-largest city.

He pops a Madonna tape into his boombox and starts dancing. His fingers, each wrapped in a Band-Aid from paper cuts sustained while making the signs, are waving wildly above his frizzy hair. He is not wearing socks.

This race is wide open--39 candidates at last count--and Green is one of the 28 or so who, quite frankly, don’t have a prayer. Political reporters call them “clutter.” The nicest thing political analyst Joe Cerrell could think of to call them was “completely irrelevant.” They do not get invited to candidate debates and when they hold news conferences, hardly anybody shows up.

Even Green’s 80-year-old mother, Augusta Greenblatt of Pembroke Pines, Fla., says that although her son is hard-working and sincere, dancing on a street corner is no way to conduct a campaign.

“He knows how to act with dignity. I thought he was past this stage,” she said.

While the mainstream contenders jockey to distinguish themselves from the pack--and let’s face it, the “viable” candidates all showed up at the first debate in suits of varying shades of gray--this crowd adds a little pizazz to a municipal election thus far upstaged by the holiday season and the inauguration of a new President.

The lesser-knowns range from a Beverly Hills physician on the warpath against hysterectomies to a 22-year-old musician who lives with his parents and voted for Goofy in the last presidential election.

Some of their ideas sound plausible: Reform the Los Angeles Police Department, control skyrocketing rents.

Some are bizarre: Cut down on pollution by making the roads move like giant conveyor belts, suck the smog out of Los Angeles with big fans.

Sure, some of these alternative candidates wear plaid shirts with checkered sport coats. Sure, a few have been known to cuss in public. Sure, one of them removed his denture plate in the middle of discussing his platform and finished the interview with no top teeth.

But if you subscribe to this newly popular doctrine of term limits and anti-incumbency, these people have a certain appeal, a kind of Ross Perot “Let’s get it done” energy that cuts through all the political mumbo jumbo voters keep complaining about.

Some are legitimate but underfunded. Some of them are crazy. All face virtually insurmountable odds. Still, they keep going, pasting together campaign signs on the living room floor and trying to run a race on $40 when most of their mainstream counterparts are shooting for $2 million or beyond. What makes them think they can pull this off?

“Simple,” Augusta Greenblatt said flatly. “It’s ego.”

*

“I’m freezing! Go kick it up!” Dr. Vicki Hufnagel snarls at one of a gaggle of female assistants trying to help her run a medical practice and become the city’s first woman mayor. It is 10:35 a.m. and she has just arrived for a 10 o’clock appointment at her chilly South Beverly Drive office, where the rug in the waiting room is mock tiger skin. She has come straight from surgery, where she seems to spend a great deal of time, taking reporters’ phone calls and cheerfully announcing that she is talking even though she has a patient on the table.

She is wearing a black pantsuit and black cowboy boots. Frosted hair hangs straight past her padded shoulders. After a 1989 run-in with state licensing authorities--who said she was charging too much and performing some procedures “inadequately”--she has a medical license in good standing, and claims a thriving practice including celebrity patients such as Rita Coolidge and Suzanne Somers.

As mayor, she would put more police on the streets not by raising taxes, but by asking her many famous friends to put on a concert four times a year.

“Putting another old boy, sexist, misogynist male in office is not going to change our society and every male running is like that,” Hufnagel fumes.

She is a defiant and articulate champion of women’s rights. She is also rude and bossy, snapping her fingers at her assistants and treating them in a manner she would not likely tolerate in a man.

Perhaps the most viable of the also-rans, Hufnagel drew rare applause when she crashed a recent candidates debate and proposed mandatory parenting classes for anyone with a child in the Los Angeles school system. After that debate, one woman in the audience praised Hufnagel’s ideas as innovative and, in the same breath, denounced her as “a crackpot.” And therein lies the dilemma of the long-shot candidate.

It is true that these people, while quite serious about their bids, are somewhat eccentric. Melrose Larry Green earned a master’s degree from Cornell University, speaks fluent Spanish and plays jazz piano. He is also a featured dancer in Madonna’s latest video, “Deeper and Deeper,” and has been endorsed by Howard Stern, the irreverent and sometimes vulgar disc jockey whose morning radio ritual includes something called “Butt Bongo.”

When informed that her son had protested at a recent City Council meeting because Marlo Thomas was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame when Stern does not have one, Augusta Greenblatt said: “Don’t tell me that. I’ll throw up.”

If there is one thing that separates the long-shot contenders--and their mothers--from the rest, it is candor. While the legitimate prospects are straightening their ties and watching their language, these candidates do not bother with pretense.

Brette X. New arrived at the Spring Street steps of City Hall promptly at 1:45 p.m. one recent Friday and set up a sign announcing his candidacy. A passerby stopped, read the sign and threw it on the ground. New bolted from his nearby marble bench and charged the man, screaming “F--- you, buddy!” Then he replaced the sign, sat back down on the bench and blamed the Police Department for the way the encounter turned out.

“If this was New York, I would’ve punched him,” New said, noting that the LAPD would throw you in jail for socking somebody, whereas in New York, the police understand that some acts of rudeness should not go unavenged.

Political observers may consider bids such as New’s laughable, but he and the rest of the wanna-bes believe they can heal this poor, aching city and some of them are making considerable sacrifices to try.

New quit his job as a legal secretary to run and stays up until midnight working on election strategy. Although front-runners such as Michael Woo and Richard Riordan are likely to spend millions to try to win this election, some of their long-shot counterparts are struggling to come up with the $300 filing fee.

Their reasons for running are varied: one got a parking ticket, another was so disturbed by the riots he felt that he had to take some action. But all are bound by one thing--an enormous ego (some would say delusion) that leads them to conclude that even with no money, no experience, no knowledge of how to balance a multibillion-dollar budget, they and only they can save Los Angeles.

Analyst Cerrell once asked mortician Irving Glasband why he was running for Congress. “It’s good for the mortuary business. I can get my name around,” he replied.

“For a $300 filing fee, they get their name on every sample ballot in Los Angeles,” Cerrell said. “On Election Day their names are on the ballot. The TV stations usually give them a couple of minutes. It’s a big ego trip.”

So they keep stumping, knocking on doors, setting up tables at shopping malls and standing on street corners. They seem to truly believe they can win. Green tried to get into Tom Bradley’s private office the other day to check out the upholstery. “I have to get accustomed to the place,” he said after an aide showed him the door.

*

“Everybody likes me when I talk,” said minister Pyung Soon Im, who is running on a platform of brotherhood, sisterhood and wider merging lanes on the L.A. freeways. “No doubt about it. I’ll win.”

Im’s campaign headquarters on the edge of Koreatown is furnished with avocado green chairs borrowed from the fledgling ministry he started after he gave up his Hollywood Boulevard gift shop that sold Elvis guitar clocks and miniature replicas of the Hollywood sign.

There are bags of clothes for the homeless, and Im spends most Saturday mornings feeding the poor. Several weeks after declaring his intent to run, he had received one $50 donation, and that was from a member of his campaign committee.

“Let me be truthful with you,” his chief assistant, the Rev. Billy Watkins, leans forward to confide. “He is completely broke.”

Even so, last year’s civil unrest so disturbed Im that he decided to do something to bring racial harmony to Los Angeles. Asked what qualifies him to accomplish this when so many before him have failed, he noted that he has three brothers-in-law--one Korean, one Caucasian and one African-American--and he gets along fine with all of them.

*

A line of cars streamed into the underground parking lot at the Anti-Defamation League’s brick headquarters on Santa Monica Boulevard. Nine men in suits, the field anointed by the press as the early viable contenders, were taking their places at a long table. The hot lights of television cameras burned around them as the second mayoral candidate debate was about to begin.

It was happening again. Twenty people had by this time declared their candidacies and only nine were invited to debate. The jilted majority had not been invited to the first debate either, but had learned about it too late to protest. This time, they would not be locked out without a fight.

Larry Green put on a fuzzy red Santa hat and loaded up the boombox. He stood on a park bench and started hollering: “This is veiled anti-Semitism! I’m a Jew!”

Hufnagel came bursting through the door, just out of surgery. She was 10 minutes late. Her assistant looked harried, tagging along after her like a bridesmaid wrestling with a tangled train.

“Find out why that man is protesting!” Hufnagel barked. Her assistant, who had been there for a half an hour and knew why Green was protesting, tried to explain. Hufnagel would not listen.

“Go talk to him!” she boomed. “There will be a criminal fraud filing!”

The lobby was filling with ADL staff members who watched glumly as their dignified forum exploded before the moderator had thrown out the first question.

The police were called and several officers stood watch over Green, arms folded, while the debate got started upstairs. Hufnagel and New, who had also asked for a place, were offered two minutes at the end of the program. Green, who was excluded after he frightened the ADL staff with what they called threats, turned his megaphone to the traffic and denounced the group as “a bunch of phony liberals and self-hating Jews.”

Reporters collected in the lobby and ADL staff members were asked to explain why the minor contenders were denied a place, which raised the question of what separates a viable candidate from a non-viable one.

“We never had any intention of inviting everybody. Our room seats no more than 100. Logistically, it’s just not possible,” a ruffled Barbara Bergen, ADL spokeswoman, said.

But if former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. had thrown his hat in the ring, you can bet they would have found an extra chair. No, clearly the real criteria are money and some kind of political track record. Most of the mainstream candidates are well-funded and have served on the City Council or held other influential governmental posts. Many of the long shots are broke, have owned auto body shops or are unemployed.

But no one wanted to acknowledge such unspoken divisions on this day.

“Who’s to say which of us is viable?” attorney Riordan, considered a leading candidate, said afterward. “I’m not God.”

In a field this big, it is easier to dismiss the minor leaguers. Reporters have too many candidates to investigate and debates slow down with too many debaters. And experts predict that altogether, these contenders might get 1% of the vote.

Then again, as analyst Cerrell said, anything can happen.

“Didn’t they elect a dead guy in New York last year?”