Mandy Miles' - "Tan Lines"
Sunday, July 18, 2010
A tale of two cities

By Mandy Miles Citizen Staff

As I write this week's column, a pile of folded clothes awaits placement in my suitcase for a Saturday flight to Atlantic City.

Stan and I are heading to my hometown at the Jersey Shore, which has been forever insulted by the ridiculous MTV reality series of the same name.

We now have to convince anyone who asks that we're not going to spend our vacation in a mall surrounded by women with high hair and huge accents.

We're going to the barrier island town of Ocean City, with six miles of beach, two miles of boardwalk and an endless supply of real pizza and great cheesesteaks.

Key West and Ocean City are both islands and are both dependent on sun-seeking tourists. But that's pretty much where the similarities end.

For example, Ocean City is not what you'd call "alluring" come January, when the shops are boarded up and the sky is bleak over a churning, gray ocean.

But it snaps back to life every spring as seasonal residents show up with the first load of groceries and clean sheets. They open their houses, take the porch furniture out of the garage and slap a coat of paint on the outside shower. Every Shore house has an outside shower, and there's usually a waiting list for it every afternoon around 4, when the sunburned masses schlep their way home from the beach at the end of the street.

The families with young kids lumber slowly toward the house. Broken sunglasses perch precariously on the nose of a stooped father, barely visible amid a gritty, wet mountain of sand toys, coolers, diaper bags and an umbrella that keeps trying to burst open on the sidewalk. Mothers are usually carrying a sleeping infant wrapped in a giant beach towel, or holding the hand of a worn-out youngster hovering between utter exhaustion and the inevitable second wind that inflates their tiny spirit at the mere mention of boardwalk rides, miniature golf or soft-serve ice cream.

Yep, in the springtime, while Key West is yawning its way into a humid summer lull, the Jersey Shore is buzzing with anticipation of yet another summer; one that's filled with beach chairs, paperbacks, boardwalk carousels and front-porch reunions.

And unlike Key West, Ocean City laws do not allow us to carry around cocktails in plastic cups. I know, I know, open containers are technically illegal in Key West, but only if you're homeless.

Instead of the eye-popping, breast-baring Fantasy Fest parade, Ocean City offers the annual family-friendly Baby Parade, and body paint is never an acceptable costume.

The Ocean City boardwalk, as the island's main tourism thoroughfare, would be comparable to Duval Street.

Of course, the Dirty Joke Guy would be replaced by a clown selling Mylar balloons in the shape of Spider-Man, Barbie, or whichever movie character is popular that year.

The bars would all be pizza joints, fresh-squeezed lemonade shacks, miniature golf courses or saltwater taffy shops.

Ocean City does have its share of T-shirt shops, although none of their owners have ever been caught charging Japanese tourists $487 for an iron-on decal.

I've never seen a drag queen in Ocean City, although the resemblance is striking between our southernmost "ladies," and the shore's most weathered and leathery women on the beach.

They're the ones permanently affixed to beach chairs in the exact same spot on the sand from morning until sunset. Most of them resume their position down here in Florida sometime around October, before their tan fades completely.

Yes, the differences between Ocean City and Key West are too numerous too count, yet they have one thing in common: me.

When in Key West, I tell my friends that I am going "home" for vacation every summer, but when I'm sitting happily on my parents' front porch discussing life at the end of the road, it's this crazy, hot island that I refer to as "home."

In recent years, I've stopped trying to figure out which one is accurate, because they both work.

If home really is where the heart is, then I have two -- homes, that is, not hearts.

The first is where I grew up, learned to drive, got my first job and met my first boyfriend. It holds my parents, the house I know intimately and hundreds of nostalgic landmarks.

The second is the place that I chose. Or rather, it chose me.

It's where I continued growing up, formed the tightest friendships and met my last boyfriend.

Both places have made me who I am, and both will always be home -- with or without drag queens and Spider-Man balloons.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a suitcase to pack. I'm going home.

mmiles@keysnews.com