Stacie Turner, What Were You Thinking?

Let's just say I was the casting director for a TV reality series called "Amazing Realtors In Washington, DC". This would be a program that showed highly professional agents doing flawless jobs for their clients. There would be no rants about colleagues, and no bad behavior whatsoever. Just the best in the industry.

The first person I would try to cast would be Long & Foster's Stacie Turner.

Let me just say that she is a professional's professional. She has an MBA from Harvard, is smart, really attractive, and is great to work with. Oh, and she most definitely passes the Fun Test.

Well, she got the casting call all right, but for Bravo's "The Real Housewives of DC".

And she answered it!

What?

Why on earth would she do that?

The show is only somewhat less tacky than "Jersey Shore", and it is certainly a television venue that relishes those moments when somebody looks really, really foolish. And isn't one of Bravo's things "Television Without Mercy"? Why would she expose herself to this?

To find an answer, my first step was to actually watch the program, which I had never seen. And it did feature a group of women, all looking silly - all except for Stacie!

She sounded smart. She looked fabulous. She didn't get sucked into any inappropriate drama. However, as the show's only African American, she did react to some of the outrageous and insensitive remarks from her co-stars.

Dang! That Ms. Turner has a highly functional brain-to-mouth filter mechanism.

So this Harvard MBA may indeed know what she is doing. On her web page about the show, she's pretty eloquent about her motives - and it's not just to promote her already thriving real estate career. I never knew, for example, that she had established Extra Ordinary Life, a charity founded to improve the lives of DC foster children (she was one for the first few months of her life). I think that's what she is really trying to promote.

And she seems to be having fun with all of the attention she's getting. I mean, she's been on the Today Show, The View, and I really hope she has a great colleague covering her business for her.

OK, Stacie! I'm impressed! Real Housewives of DC just may become my new guilty pleasure!

And if I weren't me, I might even list my house with you!

But would I ever include this particular strategy in my own business plan - this interesting means of prospecting for clients?

Don't think so - even after I reach my goal on Weight Watchers. I don't have enough faith in my ability to get through the process without looking as silly as Stacie's co-stars!