A beautiful moment in San Francisco history.
When I was a tour guide on the double-decker buses in San Francisco, I would play games with my tourists. This helped to engage them, got them interacting with each other, and it gave us something to do whenever we were stuck in traffic — which was a lot.
One of these games was called the Wave Game.
We’d wave to people on the street as happily and sincerely as we could. If you got a wave back, that was one point. A smile was half a point. A sarcastic smile was minus a point. (That was the most common response to get in San Francisco, obviously.)
If you spotted Robin Williams, you’d get 5,000 points and I promised to stop the bus so we could all go mob him together. In my 5–6 years as a tour guide, I never got to mob Robin Williams and I’m still bummed about that to this day. I bet he would’ve been super cool about it too.
I bet he would have been great at the Wave Game.
One day, I had an elderly Canadian woman who got REALLY into it.
She and her husband were practically waving their entire bodies at everyone they spotted and their enthusiasm was infectious. They had the entire bus smiling and cheering them on. I could barely get a word in edge-wise about the historical sites we were passing, but nobody seemed to care. We weren’t that kind of a bus today.
Eventually, this woman started getting frustrated with the number of sarcastic smiles she was accumulating from the locals and she decided she wanted to up the stakes.
“What do I get if I can get someone to moon me?”she asked.
“Oooooh,” teased the audience and I laughed and raised my microphone- “Fifty points and the gift of immortality.”
She leaned over the bus and screamed at a young guy in tight jeans and a hoodie, “You! Look!” she held up a twenty-dollar bill. “You want this? It’s yours, baby, all you gotta do is moon me. Show me that ass.”