The Rise and Fall of my Reality TV Career

Dear Human Resources Mangaer:

During four years as a tour guide of Savannah, I gave tours for several companies and ensured that my audience received a personalized tour based upon what they wanted to see and hear.

When you're a tour guide in Savannah, you often act as a sort of free agent and help out other companies whenever they have a big group reservation. It's a good way to make a little extra money, and groups are usually more fun, both for the guide and the tourists. But it can be a real drag when the group has no interest whatsoever in the tour and is only there because A) it's part of their trip, or B) they want a pub tour and they're interested in getting hammered and couldn't care less about the history or supernatural residents of the bar.

If it's the latter you're interested in, you need to call Greg Proffit at Creepy Crawl Pub Tour. He's a real character with his New England accent, leather jacket and fedora, looking like a paunchy, inebriated Indiana Jones and talking like one of the guys from Car Talk. He gives a good tour, but he makes no bones that you're there for the booze, and so is he. He actually made up a ghost story about W.G.'s Pub, just to give the owner more business. I've done several tours with Greg over the years with mixed results. The patrons are easy-going, but that can be annoying when I'm trying to educate the audience while they're more interested in getting wasted and talking to each other over you.

I got a call from Greg a few weeks before I left Savannah for Washington D.C. I hadn't given tours in awhile but as it turned out, Greg didn't want me to help him give a tour to a group of dental assistants from Passaic. He had been approached to film a pilot for a reality TV show and he invited me to come along and begin my career as a famous reality star. The details were sketchy, but it seemed like the plot of the show was about Savannah tour guides and their experiences. Not believing in ghosts, I thought I could appeal to the skeptics in the audience and be a straight man, kind of like Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters.

I showed up at the restaurant where the pilot was to be filmed. I knew that I was going to be pulled aside for an interview about my own personal experiences, and I knew that food and booze were on the house, and that cameramen would be filming us socializing. It was awkward making conversation with a boom mike bobbing overhead like a guardian fairy, but otherwise it was nothing too exciting. In fact, it was pretty boring. It seemed like none of the other guides knew any more about what they were doing there than me.

So then the producers asked the psychic to start reading people's energies.

The woman took a tour guide's hand while a cameraman intently focused on the action. "Okay.... if you're sensitive to energies, you'll feel this...." Both her hands folded over the tour guide's while the psychic started to chant, "Pulse... pulse..... pulse!... PULSE!!!"

The party only got more awkward for me as all of the tour guides got more and more inebriated and more and more eager to out-do everyone else's stories. Tour guides just love to be the center of attention, so to have seven of them in the same room spelled trouble. I guess all the footage of hot-shots sitting at tables wasn't too exciting, so a director clapped his hands and called out, "Okay! Everyone up! You're all having a good time, you're talking, you're excited about the ceremony tomorrow! Get up! Okay! Roll cameras!" We all stood up and resumed our conversations, only with plastered smiles and more hand gesturing.

Ceremony? What ceremony? I pulled a producer aside, the only person in the room without any loose screws, and asked her what this pilot was really about. She told me that tomorrow was the summer solstice and that a ceremony would be performed at Tybee Island, wherein a sacrifice would be offered to the ocean. "But now, we're just waiting for the wizard to show up."

A wizard? Earlier, I had met a woman who was not a tour guide but was a self-identified wiccan covered with talismans and jewelry. I assumed that the wizard was her male counterpart who would help get the sacrifice going tomorrow. But no! Eventually a wizard did show up, and a wizard he was, decked out in a floor-length gown and a pointy hat, both of which were covered with gold glittery stars. He looked more like Jack Black than Gandalf, and it was obvious that the getup was a costume he had purchased, probably at Party City. Tragically, by then the party had begun to wind down and the tour guides had almost all left when the food and free booze had stopped coming. I signed the release papers and bid a farewell to the wizard, who was a pretty cool guy when you got to know him.

But I never did hear back, and since my opportunity to become a TV star wasn't going to develop, I moved to D.C. as planned. I never did go to the sacrifice.