Picture this: You have 45 minutes to write a song, which will be judged by a panel of three. You'll be forced to drink alcohol at regular intervals while trying to concentrate. You'll be asked to use random elements from an interview with an audience member for your song.

Pestered constantly by a loud, drunken crowd, you won't be left in peace to compose your work. You can't communicate directly with your band. To top it off, you'll have to perform your song in a goofy chef's uniform at one of the hippest music venues in town.

This is the stuff of sweaty anxiety dreams -- right up there with realizing you're naked at a job interview or late for the one exam that will determine the course of your destiny.

Either that, or it's the Iron Composer competition, a new monthly event at the Crocodile Cafe in Belltown.

"I have no idea," said Reggie Watts last week in response to what a bona fide musician like him was doing in such a competition. The man is in a real band (Maktub, in case you've been under a rock for the past few years) and has a solo career to boot.

"It was just on my schedule -- it sounded random. And random equals fun," he added. Watts, 32, came to the Croc from a recording studio and had to dash off to a gig at the Mirabeau later that night.

His opponent, Anna Oxygen, 26, seemed bewildered, yet psyched about being there. When asked if she had some sort of strategy for the contest, she said, "No, absolutely none. I purposely didn't try to prepare in any way." She was sporting a tall chef's hat and oversize sunglasses, and like Watts, she was seated next to a "sous chef," who would communicate her song to the band she'd be performing with later in the night.

The brains behind Iron Composer belong to the Seattle School performance group's Mike Min, Korby Sears and Ben Houge (who recently moved to Shanghai). They held the contests at the Capitol Hill Arts Club throughout July, but space needs brought them to the Croc for the current series of monthly contests. Oxygen and Watts were the first to compete as Iron Composers at the Croc, drawing about 200 people on Sept. 16.

The contest came about because part of the group's residency at the Capitol Hill Arts Center required them to do a progressive show.

"It was just kind of pulled out of the air," said Sears, 35. (Drawing theme and kitsch value from the popular Japanese cooking show "Iron Chef," of course.)

But the thing about ideas that appear out of the ether is that realizing them is still an enormous amount of work: there's a cast and crew, a set, a director, props and, or course, contestants. The result of all the work is total chaos.

"It's not a typical theater show where it's 'here's your seat, here's your ticket, here's where you look,' " said Sears. "It's a 360-degree thing, so you can't see everything. It's impossible. You don't have the bandwidth."

Sears said there's talk of the group producing Iron Composer as a television show, but for now, he's fine with it being a club show.

Creating something under serious time constraints and chefs' uniforms aside, Iron Composer doesn't have much in common with "Iron Chef."

For one thing, organizers toss five "turmoils" -- or challenges -- into the competition. One turmoil at last week's event was the Buddy Holly Paper Airplane Turmoil, in which the audience made paper airplanes and pelted them at the contestants.

Then there's the drinking. Contestants are required to take five shots of alcohol during the five rounds of the competition. Given that the whole thing takes about an hour, that seems like a lot of booze, but the contestants obliged. Of course, we didn't sniff every shot they drank, so it's possible that some of the shots were water, not vodka. For the sake of their livers, we hope that was the case.

Chances are, you've never seen the audience so animated and caught up in the moment at the Croc. If you've seen any shows there -- or at any rock music venue in this town -- the order of the night seems to involve the audience standing still, arms crossed, maybe clutching a drink and nodding at the stage. This is how Seattle music audiences typically (not always) show their love.

Not so at the Iron Composer event.

Audience member Jim Brewer was impressed by the organizer's ability to move the Crocodile audience, one he described as being normally non-responsive, involved in the show. "It's enjoyable for the people who are here," said Brewer, 53.

The end result was high-energy, if somewhat crazed. Oxygen's post-punk rap -- with shades of Debbie Harry and Le Tigre -- brought the house down, as did Watt's beat-box intro to his song. But someone had to win, and someone had to lose -- in this case, the winner was Oxygen, and the gracious, smiling loser was Watts.