So there I was this past Thursday afternoon, deep within the throes of an alcoholic slumber when I was unceremoniously awakened by a phone call. It turns out that I had scored a press pass for that evening’s 2005 Buffalo mayoral debate.

Normally, an opportunity like that would have excited me, but as it turned out, I had already made plans for the night to work on my latest project: a reality TV show, tentatively titled In The Ghetto, that pits two groups of suburban Americans against one another in a life or death struggle to get black people to feel sorry for them. I’m currently in the negotiations stage with the WB network. The only roadblock is that I have yet to cast the final three participants for the first season.

So, after a long day in the office, I hopped in my car, and sped down 290 cutting off soccer moms in minivans and SUVs emblazoned with “Support Our Troops” stickers with every chance I got, and made my way to the WNED studios downtown.

As I walked into the studio and took my seat, I took stock of the people who had assembled for the debate—they were the perfect cross-section of Buffalo, or at least the portion of Buffalo that is predominantly white, upper-middle class, and smugly well-informed about local politics.

When the candidates entered the room, the audience’s chit-chat fell to a well-practiced coffee shop volume. I eyed them up as they took their places behind the podiums, and couldn’t help but think to myself how cute they looked.

Judith Einach of the Green Party stood there with her frumpy page-boy haircut and androgynous business suit, a hybrid of her pot-smoking constituents and my second grade teacher, Mrs. Hamilton.

Byron Brown, a Democrat and the current frontrunner, looked at home under the glare of the camera in his well-tailored business suit with a facial expression almost as vapid as his running platform.

Next in line was the Republican Kevin Helfer, whose boyishly rotund figure and cherubic face are oddly reminiscent of the late Chris Farely. It is a good look for a man who would be the political lapdog of his largest contributor, the evil-doer/millionaire developer Carl Paladino.

The fourth and final candidate, Charles Flynn of the Independence Party, was my favorite. He goose-stepped to the podium in his off-the-rack JC Penny suit with the look of a man freshly arrived from DWI court, smiling creepily at the crowd as if to make up for the fact that his platform is based entirely on the fact that he’s the only candidate who was actually born in Buffalo.

Unfortunately for me, the debate wasn’t nearly as interesting as their cartoonish personas, but I was able to glean a great impression of the candidates.

Brown, the man who will almost certainly be our mayor, is proud of his record and promises that his “comprehensive plan” for the city of Buffalo will finally bring about the change that the fair Queen City so desperately needs. All of this is true of course, if by “change” he meant leaving the same crooked, incompetent, and ineffectual jackasses in charge of Buffalo under the new and improved title of a Democratic administration.

Helfer, Brown’s only real opponent, had some genuinely compelling things to say. My favorite had to be when he looked firmly into the crowd and—without laughing, mind you—said, “The only special interest is you.” You could almost see him searching the crowd for Paladino with a tremor in his throat and half a chub in his left pocket.

Obviously, since Einach is the only Harvard-educated candidate who actually has a viable plan for turning the city around, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Dick Cheney’s extra-medium tighty whities that she’ll get elected, so I won’t bore you with the details of her platform.

As the debate wore on and I realized that not only was I missing valuable In The Ghetto time, but also a Gilmore Girls marathon on ABC Family Channel.

But I think it was somewhere in around the fourth time that both Helfer and Brown ignored debate questions to hurl ad-hoc partisan insults at each other—or when Einach called Flynn a “hooligan” in reference to his assaulting a woman during a brawl in a restaurant—that a brilliant idea dawned on me.

I sat up straight, much to the chagrin of the diminutive woman seated behind me, and began to hang on every word of the candidates. “Could it be true?” I asked myself. “Could these people really be dumb enough to stand before these television cameras and really believe that this sham of democracy that they’re taking part in is worth it? Don’t they realize this is only being watched by some dude named Tony who still lives in his parents’ basements and a bunch of elderly women whose TVs only receive public access channels?”

Needless to say, within minutes of the debate’s end, I got Helfer, Einach, and Flynn to sign over their firstborn to the Warner Brothers Corporation and inked the deal on my first show.

So anyway, come November 8, your city’s totally fucked. But make sure to catch In The Ghetto Thursdays at 8 p.m. next fall.