This is what happens when you go to a nerdy girl's bachelorette party...

This past weekend marked the beginning of my string of weekends away from home. My fabulous group of lady friends and I headed to Ocean City, Maryland for a weekend of bachelorette festivities in honor of Karyn, who's getting married in California next month.

We arrived late Friday night and spent Saturday alternating between the beach and the pool at our rented condo--it was a lovely three bedroom spot overlooking the ocean. You might expect that a bachelorette beach weekend would be filled with all sorts of drunken debauchery, cheesy inflatable sexual organs, and perhaps a strip club.

You would be wrong, mostly. You see, this was a "nerdy girl's" bachelorette party--well, nerd in the best sense, anyway. Saturday night was our big night on the town--we went out to dinner at a fun spot and began our evening at the roof bar. Nerdy moment--this roof bar had black lights, but they were compact fluorescent bulbs--how cool is that? I was wondering if you can find CFL black lights at Home Depot...anyway...just about everyone we encountered said,

"You have to go to Seacrets! It's awesome!"

So, off to Seacrets we went.

Seacrets is kind of hard to describe--but it's a "resort" on the bay side of Ocean City. Well, really it's more like a string of clubs along the bay connected by structures resembling beach huts. They have live music, DJs, etc., and during the day, you can actually sit in the water and be served drinks and food while you float. It's kind of like a beach town version of what Pleasure Island used to be at Walt Disney World (another nerdy moment--I thought the Imagineers visited Seacrets to research for PI). Karyn in her bachelorette regalia ($5 plastic veil and name tag) attracted a lot of attention and men were happy to spin the button to grant Karyn wishes ranging from making her laugh to, well, other things. At one point, we finally made it to the famed "moving dance floor." Basically, the floor in this one section of the club has enough give that if everyone is bouncing up and down, you don't have to move to look like you are also dancing. It's not really a trampoline, it's steel.

Anyway, there was good music from the DJ quickly followed by a fun cover band. We fended off a few drunk random dudes trying to join our party, including one that seemed stoned and stood in the middle of us staring off into space for a few songs and another that insisted upon standing behind Marilyn--just standing there. At one point, some random drunk guy came up to me, stood next to me and just yelled in my ear, "You're hot. PAUSE I mean, you're really hot. PAUSE I don't want to give you a big head or anything, but you're hot."

Uh, thanks.

Then, in the middle of the dance floor, I spotted one of my former students! WHOA! So, I went over to her as some guys were trying to get her to dance with them. I asked if they were bothering her and about 20 seconds later, she recognized me, gave me a big hug and put her drink in my hand. Spotting the "Bachelorette Party" tag, she came over to congratulate Karyn and bought us all a round of drinks. Drinking with my former student in a club...not really anything I would have expected, well, ever. It was random and funny--especially later when Karyn said, "Who was that nice girl that bought us all drinks?? And why???"

The next morning, some of us were enjoying coffee and chatting about the oil spill. Dawn came out and said, "are you all really discussing politics right now?" To which I replied, "This what happens when you come to a nerdy girl's bachelorette party."

Kathryn and I had to head back Sunday night while the rest of the ladies stayed through Monday. We got to watch a spectacular sunset over the water as we drove back, singing along to the Glee soundtracks at the top of our lungs.