Walk-Along: Experience the Hamptons While Sitting in Traffic

Everyone’s talking about Walk-Along, the new luxury business in the Hamptons. Walk-Along offers the complete experience of being in the Hamptons without ever leaving the comfort of your car. Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before?

The Walk-Along experience begins at their website. It explains everything. Sign up and answer a few questions. Name, contact info, license plate number, credit card. Name of dog, if you have one. (The dog name is a key question as you will soon see.) Net worth. (Optional. They don’t really need it. It’s there if you want to brag.)

It then gets underway as you arrive in the Hamptons and come to a standstill in a traffic jam here. The Walk-Along team, using scanners, finds which traffic jam you are stuck in through your license plate number. Soon, they arrive riding mopeds in the bike lane, tap on the passenger door window and ask you to roll it down. You identify them by their pink and white uniforms. They identify you by asking your dog’s name.

If you don’t have a dog, they provide you with one, handing in a pink and white battery-driven toy poodle on a leash with its name on its collar. Remember the name. It’s your password.

When signing up you will have chosen from among these available experiences.

THE BEACH: Two girls in matching pink and white bikinis hop off their mopeds, skip up to your car, turn on a machine emitting the sound of waves crashing and, using pump sprayers, spritz a mist of salty sea water through your passenger’s window for 10 minutes. After that, pink towels are thrown in and 50 squirts of suntan lotion follow. $2,500 a person.

SHARK ATTACK: A man wearing a 6-foot-tall inflatable shark suit pedals a bicycle up to your window, performs a wheelie, leaps onto the fender of your car, turns and with one gulp eats a windshield wiper, then pedals off. $3,000.

THE DOG WALKER: A young woman on roller skates leading six small purebred poodles on leashes rolls up, asks the name of your dog (either the real one or the mechanical one) and after getting the name, receives that dog through the window and takes it for a walk. Ten minutes later, relieved and fed, the dog (either one) is handed back. $3,400.

THE DRIP PAINTING: Two workmen in overalls bring a giant but blank canvas measuring 10 feet by 15 feet to the side of the car, hold it upright five feet away from the open passenger’s window, and then, after handing in rags, brushes, and buckets of paint, ask that you throw or fling the paint sideways onto the canvas for five minutes. With the painting done, it’s whisked away. Ten minutes later, two art dealers in suits arrive with canvas bags full of fake thousand-dollar bills to enthusiastically pay for your work. $8,500.

FISHING: This item is only available to those driving an SUV with a sunroof. The driver slides the roof open, stands on the seat with her or his head and shoulders outside and receives a nine-foot-long fishing pole handed up by an experienced charter boat captain. After you repeatedly cast out and reel in, a wet fish of your choice, a 30 -pound bluefish for example, is tossed through the backseat side window to flop still alive into the laps of the passengers in the back. These passengers, handed wooden hammers, will then have 10 minutes to pound the fish to death. $10,500.

SUSHI: This item is related to the one above. After the fish is dead, a kitchen truck wheels up, a door opens and a sous chef takes the fish and sets it on a big wooden tray attached to the front passenger-side window. With that, a top-rated Michelin chef with a big knife and a white toff hat emerges from the kitchen truck and dices, slices and doles out the fish as a stunning just-caught sushi appetizer with soy, ginger, rice and spicy green wasabi onto silver plates held by the sous chef. It’s then served to everyone. $14,500.

DINNER: After servers replace the plates with fresh ones, another chef, a James Beard Award winner, brings out platters of just-killed red lobsters, salads, double-baked potatoes in their jackets and melted butter for everyone. A decorated sommelier appears carrying two bottles of the finest East End wine, to stand alongside a young maiden offering empty wine glasses to everyone, except for the driver, of course, and then asks “Vin blanc ou rouge?” Samples are poured, swirled, sniffed, sipped and then, if acceptable, imbibed from the now -full glasses. “Bon appetit!” the assistant chirps. Both then leave. $14,900.

YOUR NOVEL: A computer is wheeled up. Speak your book’s plot into a chatbot. A minute later, the computer’s printer thumps out 100 hardcover copies of your 300-page novel and hands them in. $53,000.

COUTURE: Two very slender and wispy people, either men, women or whatever, approach the car on the passenger side bearing the very latest frocks, shoes, hats and sunglasses and then, uninvited, leap in, and whether you like it or not, violently rip off everyone’s dated clothes to luxuriously and carefully reclothe everyone in the most up-to-the-minute fashions imaginable. Alors! $74,000.

MASSAGE: A group of masseuses, one to a customer, climb through the open windows with oils, ointments and creams, velcrow a series of small red curtains to the padded ceilings of the car’s interior so all the passengers can be squeezed, smacked and rubbed in private for 20 minutes or until the people in the car behind begin honking. $80,000.

TENNIS: The current winner of the U.S. Open will thwack a ball into your car so a designated passenger can thwack it back for 10 minutes. $90,800.

FUNDRAISER: A giant-screen interactive TV is suction-cupped to the hood of your car so that, after speeches given by the emcee, honoree and comedian, you may participate interactively in a fundraiser auction for charity, using paddles handed through the car windows. Free.

THE FINALE: A 30-minute documentary about the Hamptons will be shown on the TV screen still atop your car’s hood. A learned narrator, perhaps Bob Caro, will lecture about windmills, Bonackers, high society, horse shows, polo, celebrities and hedgerows. Free.

CANCELLATION? Not allowed. All costs paid in advance. No refunds. However, those canceling may keep the mechanical dog as a souvenir.