Chapter 10: Reality TV and Further Threats

Jenny appeared at the door to Dave’s office and caught his eye. He was doing emails on his desktop computer. She said, “I have a couple of unusual visitors that I think you should see. If I understand their proposition, I think it sounds like fun, but you decide. If you want JR and I will also join in, and any of the others from the Circle.”

Dave looked puzzled, “I don’t understand.”

Jenny said, “You will after you talk to the man and woman for two minutes. Will you see them? They’re in reception. I think you should talk to them. They’re very nice people – man and woman. They apologized for showing up without an appointment, but felt it was important enough to come see you from Atlanta and then wait until you were free.”

“Sure. Let’s meet in our conference room. I take it this has little to do with EneRG.”

“Correct. It’s about the Circle and specifically you. I’ll go escort them in.”

Jenny disappeared and Dave sauntered into the conference room down the hall just as Jenny escorted a young, nicely dressed couple into the room.” Jenny backed out of the room but nodded to encourage her ‘boss’. The two of them smiled at Dave in a friendly manner and he returned the visual.

The man reached forward to shake Dave’s hand, “I’m Al Berker and this is Helen Ursinger.” He passed two business cards to Dave. Al was a stocky guy slightly shorter than Dave, and probably in superb shape given the look of the arm muscles in his golf shirt. Helen was an attractive blonde also in her middle thirties.

Al explained, “We’re with Spring Garden Productions based in Atlanta. I don’t expect that you’ve heard of us, but I do suspect you’ve seen some of our work on television. We specialize in reality television shows, but not the kind that are dramatic constructs like throwing a bunch of people on an island and then watching them fight, form alliances, and have to eliminate each another. We just want to find interesting situations and film them. If there’s drama, that’s nice; if there’s not we don’t see a need to create anything artificially.”

Dave kind of guessed where this was going. He posed, “And?”

“A friend of ours on the west coast is kind of married to one of your wives. It took us half-an-hour to understand just that simple statement.”

“Don Abrams?”

“Precisely. He gave us the links to several articles about your Circle, and specifically about your family and your cohousing situation. He also gave us an update. You apparently have ten wives, one of whom is Scarlett Johansson?”

“That’s correct.”

“What we’re asking is whether you would be willing to be our subjects for a few months as our cameras follow some of you around through your various activities. The big feature of interest would be that you have this large plural family AND that you’re immersed in a polyamorous community.”

Dave speculated, “Scarlett and one or two others may not want to participate.”

“We will be glad to talk to them and explain what we’re trying to do. If they don’t want to be in any of the videos, we would hope to be able to reference them and have you talk about them, but they just wouldn’t appear. We think we can deal with many situations that way. This is new ground for us so we’ll be playing part of this by ear.”

“We have very open sexual relationships within the family and within our circle of friends.” Dave figured he’d level with them from the start.

“Don explained that to us. I’m not sure how to handle that just yet since we obviously can’t put explicit material on television – at least on the channels we cater to. We hope to sell the ultimate edited video products to one of the cable channels that specialize in this type of thing – reality TV, I mean.”

“How would this work? What would we have to do?”

“Well, we’d assign several one- or two-man camera crews to you. Depending on the situation and our on-the-scene producer, we’d follow various people as they go about their daily business and interactions. We’d emphasize the ‘family’ nature of your Prentiss family – you and your ten wives, and try to pick up the interactions with those outside your family as secondary. If there are situations we miss, we might ask that you kind of repeat them so we can capture them on film. Normally, though, we try to avoid staging things. Helen, here, would be one of the onsite producers.”

“What’s the end goal?”

“Enough interesting video material for us to put together thirteen forty-eight-minute videos worthy of broadcast television. Let me ask, did you ever see any of the videos of the series entitled Sister Wives?”

Dave shook his head.

“In that show the lead male Kody Brown has four wives. They’re religiously based in Utah at the start. I think they’ve gone over twelve seasons now, but the wives live apart from each other in separate homes with their kids they had mostly with Kody. They all only interact with great drama ensuing, and some of the problems they face are far from normal. We want to try to overlay ‘normal’ society over where you are in life and how you interact. Don said you work with some of your wives and do live together in great harmony; we definitely want to capture that. Good role models are hard to find.”

“So, this might go on for some time?”

“It would depend on the success of the series, interest by the viewers in more of your episodes, and what kind of fan mail we generate, and of course on your willingness to continue.”

Helen said, “Don talked about how you don’t abide by many standard social constructs in your relationships and that you treat everyone with great equality regardless of sex or other aspects in their life. We especially want to capture how those play out in an overarching male-dominated society. We think you have a handle on how mankind should be living.”

Dave was silent for a long time as he looked at Al and Helen. He knew they were waiting for objections so that they could rebut them. There was something about the idea of the TV show that appealed to Dave. It wasn’t the ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ effect; he’d already had that several times over. Perhaps it was his desire to propagate some of the aspects of the Circle philosophy to the general public.

Dave yelled towards the conference room door, “Jenny, can you and the others from the Circle join us.”

Al asked, “Others?”

Dave smiled, “Several of my wives and other Circle members work here at EneRG. My wife Alice is the CFO. The other, JR, is my chief operating officer. Nikky and Jenny are like wives, too. I like smart women.”

A few moments later Jenny, Nikky, Alice, JR, Deb, Larry, and Lars filed into the conference room. Jenny had apparently given them the elevator speech about why Al and Helen were there. They sat around the table after the flurry of introductions. The atmosphere was friendly and engaging.

Dave gestured at Al and Helen and they again made the pitch for the videoing of the family and some Circle activities.

Alice asked, “Besides Scarlett, we have several others we interact with that have very high networth. We want to be able to protect them, including our geographic location. Can you do that and preserve the integrity of your show?”

Al had an aside with Helen. She responded, “We can even make this sound like you live closer to some other Florida city – say Orlando or Winter Haven instead of Sarasota. You’d have to help us by keeping references to geographic places generic instead of specific, for instance referring to ‘downtown’ instead of ‘downtown Sarasota’. Would that be good enough? We’re very accommodating about this kind of thing. We don’t want any of you to end up with stalkers.”

There was a raft of other questions, including how the explicit sex would be handled. When the issue of home schooling was brought up, Dave thought that Al and Helen would orgasm they were so excited about filming the kids being raised in a different environment, especially after learning how they were so far ahead of their public-school cohorts.

After a silence Dave said, “Could you come talk to the larger group of us some evening – maybe even tonight?” That question led to an open meeting of the Circle in the core living room a week later. About a hundred people attended the after-dinner meeting after learning what the topic would be.

There were more good questions and ultimately most people thought the whole idea would be fun to try, and especially the pledges that would loosen up in some way as a result of filming and performing on camera.

Filming started almost immediately after they agreed in early October. A couple of contracts were signed by all the parties. Three two-man camera crews showed up with Helen as the one producer.

As the apparent alpha male in a household with ten wives Dave became one of the focal points for filming. The crew spent a lot of time the first day with him at EneRG filming him in meetings, resolving problems, making marketing teleconference calls with JR, reviewing contracts with a couple of the lawyers, and then talking with Nat and the other staff in R&D. The company had been filmed before so there were no proprietary secrets revealed in the videos, although Dave was sure the competition would be scanning the videos to be sure.

That evening he got welcomed home by Alice, Pam, and Heather with lots of hugs and kisses. He changed into casual clothes noting that they wore full bikinis and then the four of them went out to the patio. Dave started to work behind the bar, explaining about the concept of service to Kellie, who played the role of pledge for that portion of the video. Dave was obviously in the role of sensei and mentor. Her scholarship was briefly mentioned without reference to her prior employment at the Club Ecstasy.

The other bartenders and the waitresses were all primly dressed compared to usual. The cute and sexy little waitress uniforms were gone, replaced with jeans and conservative tops. The girls still looked sexy, but not like sex on a stick. Several people complained about missing the spiciness of the cocktail hour staff and Dave did see one camera capturing the comments that let people know they’d tightened up the dress code.

Cricket, Jenny, JR, and Bridget came to Dave behind the bar for hugs and kisses. Each whispered some outlandish and salacious sexual comments to him that provoked some private laughter. Later, Dave noted the camera shots picked up his somewhat shocked responses to their welcomes.

Dave sat with Cindy Worthington – his part-time wife, Emily, Abby, Nora, and Lars at dinner. Cindy held the stage talking about how slow her opening the local office for her investment firm was going. She couldn’t find suitable staff for the office management positions except in the clerical and administrative positions.

Dave teased her about just wanting to stay longer with him rather than return to her ‘other life’. The producer slipped him a note asking him to do something to define what her ‘other life’ was. Dave showed Cindy the note and they had a brief aside to define a way to talk about the Worthington Clan.

There was a re-shoot of the scene with Dave again teasing her, this time about her wanting to stay with him rather than return to her ‘other husband’ and the family that willingly ‘shared her’ with him. Cindy made a point of talking about how her sister should be taking care of the over-abundant libidos in her other family. The sexual undertone was unmistakable.

Dave made sure there was a follow-up discussion about no one in either geographic locale ‘owning’ Cindy or having control over her. The points about non-monogamy, non-exclusiveness, and non-possessiveness were raised in a smooth and eloquent fashion.

Abby propositioned Dave over dinner. They hadn’t been together in ages, so he agreed to spend the ‘first part of the evening’ with her before becoming available to form a liaison with someone else for the rest of the night. Dave saw Helen, the female producer, trying to figure out whether and how they could use that footage.

Of course, elsewhere at the dinner similar arrangements were being made, sometimes in a threesome but usually between a man and woman. As Dave stood to go off with Abby, his sister-in-law Shelby came and greeted Dave with a major bomb of affection. She also wanted time with him, so he agreed to see her in about an hour-and-a-half or so at her house. He asked, “What’s Aaron doing?”

Shelby laughed, “Oh, he’s going to be spending the evening with Erin after little Josh goes to sleep. From the sounds of it, I doubt my husband will be getting much sleep. Erin seemed unusually horny.”

Dave teased, “And you’re not?”

“Oh, I’m just ‘normal’ and I know you can scratch my itch, especially if you’re willing to give me The Experience. It’s been months and I’m ready again for a real jolt of loving passion from you.”

Dave bowed, “At your service. See you soon.”

The camera followed Dave and Abby as they walked between a couple of houses, took a golf cart, and drove to Derek’s house on Perimeter Drive. They went inside as the camera followed them. Abby winked at Dave and whispered, “Let’s just ignore the camera and see whether we can gross out the crew.”

The pair stood in the living room and started to make out. The camera moved around them in a 360-degree circle capturing their kisses from all angles. Hands slid under clothing and then suddenly Abby’s top went flying towards one of the chairs. She was bra-less, so suddenly her ripe melons went on display and Dave moved right to them to suck and lick in ways that pleased his partner.