Wild Rose – Chris Ortega
I did not want to go to work tonight, it had been raining all day, it was verging on misty, the wind had only just dropped. What I really wanted was to curl up with my sewing and a hot water bottle. To make matters more intimidating, I was running a private tour tonight…a private tour, of teenagers.
Of all the ages groups we work with for Ghost Tours, teenagers are usually the hardest. Little kids are easy they usually have multiple chaperones and you can keep them in control just by scaring them to silence, adults normally are mature enough to keep their peace and if they aren’t we are normally able to handle them with a few well placed words. Teenagers? A little different…to say I was dreading this tour was an understatement…
But I forgot one crucial thing. This wasn’t just any high school group, this was an American marching band, in town to participate in the Victoria Day Parade this weekend. What does this mean? This means these kids are the creme de la creme of their music program, and they paid a *lot* to make this trip (probably fundraised for several years to get here), more importantly their discipline level? Is through the roof.
When we saw the huge greyhound bus pull up we were nervous, when 51 of them spilled out onto the pavement we were even more nervous…and then…we realized we had no reason to be.
These ‘kids” were amazing.
They were scared senseless from the very beginning, but amazing. And since I was working with one of the other actors on the team, we play well off each other, we spin the stories into each other. We ran the normal route in reverse, starting in the office and ending at the hotel, which worked well, because the tour has high points at both ends. By the time we got to the second to last story they were babbling, not being brats not being inconsiderate, just babbling because they were excited, I couldn’t get their attention, and then I remembered – these guys are a marching band.
For those of you who actually don’t know (and there may be a few by this point), I’m very tiny, no one really expects me to exert myself, let alone a group of 50 excited teenagers but I used to be in a marching band, and I had seen something when they got off the bus that reminded me…so, I turned my microphone up a touch:
“ATTEN HUT!!!!!”
And instantly the response comes back from 51 fully attentive band members:
“HUT!”
And so I had their attention back, before they even realized they’d given it to me. I was pleased.
The weather kicked up as we finished the last half of the tour, becoming a true dark and stormy night, the wind was literally screaming.
All in all…definitely a good end to my latest season in black