My First Reality Show

Well, my first reality show, “Walk the Walk,” is in production. It will pay me enough to live well for a year.

It was easy. Just get that initial concept, pitch it to the right guys, and you’re in.

“Walk the Walk” is so simple. Each episode begins with five guys in Central Park. In the first episode, they’re furniture movers, real professional guys, all single or divorced. Each one gets a celebrity. He takes her up in his arms and starts walking north out of the park. Maybe one of the guys gets an Uma Thurman or a Kirstie Alley – you know, a real horse – to provide us with a laugh as we watch the guy lugging her like a couch, but for the rest, it’s just normal-sized women stars. No Calista Flockharts or other lightweights with an obvious eating disorder.

So off go these guys, and they can’t put their woman down. Nature takes its course and the guys get more and more tired. Their arms are falling off, for Pete’s sake. The women try to encourage them, keep them going, because there is a prize involved. One woman might insult her guy, call him weak, impugn his manhood, threaten him, so forth. Another might nuzzle him, make promises, anything to keep him from dropping her.

So this goes on as they leave the park and head north on 7th Avenue. Destination: the Bronx Zoo, which is one hell of a hike. One by one, the guys crap out, until there is only one left with a star in his arms. It’s summer and he’s sweating bullets. But now he doesn’t have to cradle her. Now he can carry her piggyback, or reverse-piggyback in front, or on his shoulders. She’s up there with her thighs around his ears, him trudging along through Harlem at two in the morning. The show isn’t on Starz, so we only go so far with the cheese.

They talk. The show is all about them getting to know each other, their hopes, their dreams. The sweat keeps coming. They get a bathroom break at Yankee Stadium. The guy is a mess, which makes him drop his social defenses and get more animal in his conversation. The celebrity is moved by this on a libidinal level. It’s like a damned movie to her.

If they make it to the zoo, they get a free weekend at a B&B in Mamaroneck, which is up on the way to Stamford. The camera doesn’t follow them but as the show’s credits are rolling, we check back with the guy Monday morning as he goes out with his van to help a retired couple move from their apartment in the East 60s over to Bushwick, to be closer to their grandchildren.