When you are a writer and you live in New York, you sometimes take odd jobs in order to earn a living. I pay my bills by walking in the footsteps of a fellow (albeit fictional) New York writer, Miss Carrie Bradshaw. I am a Sex and the City tour guide.
My workday starts on the corner of 58th and 5th, where I stand with a blue umbrella waiting for my customers to arrive. They come from all over the world, women mostly, ages 18 to 80, and have often bought their tickets months in advance. My “office” pulls up to the curb: a 56-passenger bus, complete with televisions and a toilet. I greet the only co-worker I see on a regular basis, my driver, and then we all hop aboard for a three-and-a-half hour ride. There is a shopping stop on Bleecker Street and a cocktail break in SoHo. We visit a restaurant in the Meatpacking District and browse aisles of sex toys on Seventh Avenue. I point out Sushi Samba and Tiffany & Co. and Tortilla Flats while chattering non-stop about bad dates and nosy mothers-in-law and vibrators as if I were with my best girlfriends at brunch. Nearly every bus is sold out.
There comes a point during each tour when somebody asks, “Were you a fan of the show before the job?” The answer is yes, a resounding yes. I think Sex and the City (the series) is a smart, witty, fully realized and deftly executed take on modern womanhood, as relevant and worthwhile as any Austen novel. I will defend the quality of the storylines and the direction and the editing and anything else to anyone who begs to differ. There is no need to manufacture my enthusiasm for the topic. (As for the films, well, I prefer to deny their existence.)
What I do need to manufacture at times however, is my image. To my tourists, I am not only a portal to Carrie’s world, but a stand-in for Carrie herself, and she and I have our differences. I don’t like nightclubs, for instance, and haven’t been to one since 2006. My three best friends live far away. Though I can appreciate a good shoe, I am not particularly obsessed. Most importantly, I have never been single in New York. I dated one man for ten years with very little drama, and when we got married last May, I worried what my customers would think. How could I embody Carrie while sporting a wedding band?
But there are parts of my reality that do mirror Sex and the City simply because I am a woman in my 30s who lives in the City. There are small details, like Russian bikini waxers and taxi rides when your feet hurt and pizza on the go. There are the events you stumble upon: human art installations and DVF sample sales and rooftop parties and drag queen Bingo. Certain things make this city tick, and those things helped make Carrie tick, and there is no denying that some of those same things make me tick too. And because Carrie is a well-written character, she struggles to embrace her choices but never stops doubting them. If a writer with a day job as a Sex and the City tour guide can’t relate to that, who can?
Is it silly to want to walk in Carrie’s shoes for an afternoon? Well, sure. There is implicit madness in the very idea of such a tour; it brings into focus people’s desperate longing to be something other than what they are, to live in a fantasy. But it is also uniquely and wonderfully human to want to be transported like that, to want to enter into the time or the place or the mind frame of the particular stories and characters that have moved you. If there were a tour that could take me to a dance in Hertfordshire where Mr. Darcy is rumored to appear, I’d buy my ticket months in advance too.
So as I sit here with my laptop, watching the city from my window, I can’t help but wonder: Where does reality end and fantasy begin? And how much, really, does it matter? If New York can sustain the lofty fantasies of all the would-be Broadway stars and Wall Street tycoons and great American novelists, then surely it can sustain one more writer and a little ride around town on a bus.
Emily Sproch is a writer and a Sex and the City tour guide. Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”
