In between making fundraising phone calls that seemed to be almost physically painful for Billy to make, he said the mayoral campaign was off to a good start: “We seem to be getting a wonderful response. It’s so clear that common sense is radical right now.”

And the common sense back in April – which seems to have rapidly receded from the popular consciousness, at least as expressed through the mainstream media – was that Wall Street had run dangerously amuck and needed to be reformed.

“The bubble economy of Mike Bloomberg, which is Wall Street, tourism and real estate, the speculation on real estate, it’s relationship to the neighborhoods is like it’s trying to invade a Third World country. It’s coming in with gentrification and rent hikes and chain stores, we call it to the demon monoculture,” Billy said, punching those final two words with a preacher’s flair.

Billy Talen seems born to perform, but before he developed that preacher’s flair, the persona he adopted to satirize the system was George Cudahay, which ran a fake campaign for president out of San Francisco in 1992.

“I made up a character to run for president and I remember I was on the cover of the Bay Guardian,” he said, reflecting on the nascent forerunner of his current campaign. “I never really thought of that until right now, but I wasn’t really running then when I was George Cudahay, it was more like Tony and Tina’s Wedding. I just made up the character and said I was a scion to the sausage fortune in Milwaukee,” he said, talking about how they staged campaign events with a “magic surrealism that was corrupt.”

By 1995, while staging a play called Life on Water at Fort Mason center, he found the calling for his most enduring character, Rev. Billy, which would go on to become something like a real populist church and anti-consumerist statement through vehicles like the film, “What Would Jesus Buy?”

“We were always concocting ways to show the corruption of politics at that time. And then I went off into being a reverend, a political reverend,” Billy said. “The political performance art projects, with its comic elements, was basically a parody, with Elvis impersonating late night shouting, I want your money, homophobic, war-mongering, Trinity Broadcasting network guy. Late night cable icons, and political icons really. I mean, this was a guy that had a free for all in the White House from Ronald Reagan to a couple months ago. The impact on our domestic and foreign policy by that guy, that right-wing Ted Haggard, that guy, that Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell guy. It’s outrageous. So one of the ideas back in the ‘90s, one of the ideas, was to appropriate a right-wing icon.”

But Billy doesn’t take credit for the idea, or claim divine inspiration. Rather, he credits a particular man.

“My mentor and teacher, the person who talked me into this was himself a priest, not a preacher, and his name was Reverend Sidney Lanier. He was the guy who came to Fort Mason, to Life on the Water in the early ‘90s. He lived in the Marina District there and he took me out to lunch and he told me, ‘I’m not to sure about your play, but you have a prophetic note in your voice.’ And he said, ‘We now need a new kind of American preacher.’ So Sidney himself was not a preacher, but an appreciator of preachers. He’s Tennessee Williams’ cousin and best friend, and he’s from the New York world more than the San Francisco world. Tennessee wrote a play about him, ‘Night of the Iguana,’ which became a John Huston movie. And the first scene of that movie, Richard Burton, playing the character was T. Lawrence Shannon, who was Sidney Lanier. And he has a meltdown and drives the congregation out into the rain with his stupendous sermon. That has been a metaphor for our work.”

But Billy didn’t accept his calling easily: “I said let Saturday Night Live do that, because I didn’t want to be a Christian. I was raised by right-wing Christians from Dutch Calvinists in southern Michigan and I said I don’t want that. I was hurt too badly by that. I don’t want to go back to that. I don’t even want to make fun of them. But Sidney, he seduced me. It took two or three years, but he was Lenny Bruce’s friend, and said Lenny played all the religious characters,” Billy said. “That’s what you have to do. You have to be a public intellectual. You have to take that character. And he talked me into it, and now I call him almost every day.”

Lanier took Billy to New York City in 1996, and he has lived and preached there every since. “He brought me to New York and he placed me in front of that Disney store and he left,” said Billy, who then found his voice, preaching, “Mickey Mouse is the anti-Christ! I want you to take that little tourist family and go back to Iowa! These are sweatshops products on these shelves, children. This Disnification of neighborhoods, it’s the devil monoculture! So my theme hasn’t changed much in these 10 or 12 years.”

But then, earlier this year, he found a new calling when the Green Party asked him to be its mayoral candidate. “The Green Party approached us and we had just completed a three-year process with ‘What Would Jesus Buy?’ the movie,” said Billy, who is now trying to translate sermons to an overtly political stage. “We want people to make decisions about the big system, but they don’t have a second system to go to because in the United States, we don’t have a way to consider socialism, so we tend to make it is psychologized, Puritanical decision: oh it’s me, I’m spending too much. We can’t talk about the system.”

His campaign is still honing its message. “We’re still exploring right now how systemic to make our critique. It’s a balance between Mike Bloomberg and the narrative of the extremely rich man who takes over the government, that’s an Olympian narrative of consumerism. But he’s smart enough to play the art card, and the bike card, and he keeps the iconoclasts happy so that you can’t accuse him of being Lee Scott, the president of Wal-Mart. He’s not a very sophisticated man. He has a very narrow life. But he’s smart enough to know about imagery and hire marketing people to give him the very best advice.”

Even back in April, Billy rued the fact that the media moment for reforming capitalism was slipping away, something he is endeavoring to stop: “We’ve been in the eye of the storm, and they’re just trying to arrange their stimulus money and start it up again.”