By FERN SHEN

So, did City Councilman Bill Henry show contempt for devotees of the Senator Theatre by blowing off a meeting about it and celebrating up the street at Zen Cafe where he could be seen “perched on a barstool” with  “mayor’s office insiders?”

Or was he simply told about the meeting too late to get out of other commitments and it wasn’t that important anyway because he’d been to umpteen others like it?

More importantly, is the city forsaking the historic, Deco-decorated, big-screened Senator by putting it up for auction on July 22, placing it at risk for being turned into a church or medical supply store?

Or are they saving the debt-laden establishment from that fate, after giving it more than half a million dollars of loans over the years that went god-knows-where?

How apt that the Senator on Friday will begin showing Kurosowa’s  “Rashomon.”

In the days leading up to the auction, these starkly different views of  reality have been on display in a volley of increasingly personal emails between the Senator’s longtime owner Tom Kiefaber and Bill Henry, the area’s City Council representative.

Besides the email war (viewable at Friends of the Senator Theatre and AstroGirl’s Galaxy Guide)  there’s the marquee.

Kiefaber’s taken it down now, but for a while there, the councilman was called out right on the front of the marquee.

“Councilman Henry Won’t Meet With the Community About the Auction,” it announced in big black letters, for all of York Road to see.  (It also said: “Stop the City Auction! It’s Russian Roulette or a Rigged Sham.”)

“I asked him to take it down,” Henry said recently. “I told him it was rude.”

The latest email in the back-and-forth came late last week. In it, Henry explains why he thinks the charge of non-responsiveness was unfair.

Henry goes on to discuss the whole deal, including his basis for saying that the auction is  “unlikely” to result in the Senator going to some undesirable bidder.

Kiefaber and AstroGirl (aka writer Laura Serena, an unabashed Senator groupie) make the opposite case, at length.  Some other places to see/hear the issue discussed lately:

Interview with Kiefaber in Investigative Voice. 7/10/09

Interview with Kiefaber by Tom Marr on WCBM. 7/10/09

To see Liz Farmer’s succinct boil-down of the core contentious issues go here . The  Daily Record business writer has been slogging through this melodrama for months.

The auction, to be conducted by Alex Cooper Auctioneers,  is scheduled for Wednesday July 22, 11 a.m. on the premsies.