Local family walks the ‘Wife Swap’ plank and lives to tell the torrid tale

By THERESA HOGUE
The Entertainer

It started out as a joke, as many weird and wonderful things do. Tori and John Baur of Albany, known in pirate circles as Mad Sally and Ol’ Chumbucket, were contacted by producers of the ABC show “Wife Swap,” to see if they knew any pirate re-enactors who might be interested in participating in the show.

“I was being a smart ass, and I e-mailed them back and said ‘Why would you want re-enactors when you can have the real thing?’” Tori said. “So then of course they called the next day and before you know it we became swept up in this thing.”

And that’s how Tori and John suddenly became participants on a primetime reality show, a concept they’d never imagined. John is the co-founder of the wildly popular International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which has already thrust him into the spotlight, but their episode of “Wife Swap,” which airs 9 p.m. Monday, Sept. 18, on ABC, will take the Baur family to the next level of public exposure.

Originally, it seemed that the show would provide great PR for Baur and his work partner, Mark Summers’, new pirate-themed book. But it snowballed into a long, arduous and often stressful project that started with a 26-page contract and full medical and psychological exams for all of the show’s participants, and will end with the airing of the show next week.

“I’m not sure I want to watch it,” Tori said. “I already lived it. I don’t need to see it. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed about anything I did. My mother might be.”

The premise of “Wife Swap,” which is known on this particular episode as “Wench Swap,” is that women from two families exchange positions for two weeks, living as the wives and mothers of the other family. The Baurs swapped with a conservative non-pirate family in Sacramento.

Having camera crews follow your every move wasn’t easy, especially while having to deal with a new family member.

“Don’t do a show like this unless you can be brutally honest with yourself about ‘How bad would I look and am I OK with that?’” John said. “We did give that some consideration and part of what we decided about our lifestyle is that we’re not about appearances, and we don’t really care what people think.”

“We are absolutely unapologetic about who we are and how we live,” Tori said. “If you don’t like it, don’t come over.”

The Baurs have six children, three of which still live at home. Kate, 16, Millie, 14 and Max, 8, all agreed to participate in the program, and their parents checked in with them constantly during the process, to make sure they were handling the disruptive presence of cameras (and a new mom) all right.

“We’ve had more trauma from it than the kids,” Tori said. “They were over it the next day.”

Normally, the Baurs don’t dress as pirates every day, but for the show, they appeared in full regalia, because, after all, they were pushing the concept of “Pirattitude,” which, not coincidentally, is the topic of the book Baur and Summers wrote.

“Through the process we did find that we do have pirattitude on a day to day basis, we have the attitude of a pirate,” Tori said. “That’s what we discovered most throughout this, yes, we are for freedom, we’re for fun, we’re for…”

“Living our lives for us, not for outside expectations, and if we don’t meet your expectations, that’s your problem, not ours,” John added. “We thought it would be control versus chaos and messy versus neat, but it became about appearance, and living to meet other people’s expectations versus living your own life for yourself.”

Although the Baurs weren’t allowed to talk about details of the show, it was clear that the couples did not get along. The Baurs felt that the other family was obsessed with appearances, and too rigid in their conformity to society’s standards, and felt that they appeared wacky and irresponsible to the other family.

But conflict makes good TV.

“It’s gonna be a fun show to watch,” Tori said. “It’s wacky, it’s crazy, pirates are huge right now.”

“It’s the thing in pop culture right now,” John said. “Pirates are the new vampires.”

For more information on Baur’s book or International Talk Like A Pirate Day, go to www.talklikeapirate.com. To get more information on Wife Swap, go to http://abc.go.com/primetime/wifeswap/index.html.

To hear an extended interview with John and Tori Baur, go to www.gazettetimes.com and click on the GT TO Go logo.