Back in 1988, I spent the summer in Washington, DC. I had two jobs. By day, I was a vastly underpaid intern in a law firm. By night, I was working my dream job in the prep kitchen at Slade's in Ballston. At the very end of the summer, I quit those two jobs so that Kim and I could spend a couple days in Ocean City, MD, before I went back to school for my senior year.
Those three days in Ocean City were the first real vacation of my life. Growing up with nine people in the family, our travel pretty much consisted of the annual trip to Lewis Run for the Piscitelli Family Reunion. That was it. While those trips were always fun, they weren't really a "vacation." So, I was really looking forward to that late summer trip to the beach.
Unfortunately, what I remember most about the trip is two things. First, the beach and I really didn't get along too well. I just couldn't deal with all that sand. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep it off of me. Second, Ocean City was trashy. Trashy people, trashy streets, trashy bars and restaurants -- it was pretty much trashy everything.
Having lived full time in Maryland since 1989, you would think that I'd have made it back to Ocean City at least once since that initial trip. After all, going "down the ocean" for summer weekends is a Maryland tradition. But, I'd been able to avoid going back to Ocean City for 24 years. That streak was finally broken last week when I had to attend a work function there for three days.
I can tell you that not much has changed in 24 years. To give you a sense On my first night there, we took a couple clients out for dinner. We had reservations at one of the nicer places in Ocean City. The service was slow. The food was bad. So, we had to rely on people watching.
The highlight of that activity was the family of four that came in for dinner at about 9PM. The father was dressed in a pair of relatively nice shorts and a nice polo shirt. The teenage son was impressively clean cut and dressed quite a bit like his father. The teenage daughter was also quite tastefully dressed. In fact, unlike most of the teenage girls I saw in Ocean City, she wasn't trying to call any attention to herself. That task was left to the mother.
The mother was about 40 years old, quite trim (with one exception -- more on that later), and had a full head of blond hair. She was wearing a skirt that fell below her butt cheeks by about one inch. That one inch, of course, was black lace. Above the skirt, she was wearing a black leather vest. That's it -- just a vest, held together by two or three buttons.
Have you ever seen a woman wearing just a vest? What about a particularly buxom woman wearing just a vest? Take a moment to imagine what it looks like. Got it? That's right -- it doesn't leave a lot to the imagination.
The thing about the scene that got me was that the two kids were so conservatively dressed. As I watched them at their table eating dinner, I couldn't help wondering what they were thinking, sitting there with their mother. Did she dress like that all the time? Or, was it Ocean City that brought out the trashiness in her? I'm going with the latter.
This is where the magic happens.
