Nerd Nite Says Goodbye to Gramps After 11 Years

Be there and be square, one last time.

Well, at Gramps, anyway. The soon-to-be-former Wynwood venue has hosted the Miami chapter of Nerd Nite for monthly evenings of “entertaining and educational presentations” since 2014, and with its January closure looming, the group is taking one final bow on Thursday, December 18. Its Gramps goodbye follows the recent closure of Pizza Tropical, and it precedes the venue’s final edition of Double Stubble, Wynwood’s longest-running drag series, which also concludes that night.

To be clear, Nerd Nite Miami will continue at some other, to-be-determined spot(s) under the able guidance of current host Ricardo Williams. (In the past, the group has done one-off events at the Pérez Art Museum, Vizcaya, and HistoryMiami.) But the occasion calls for a quasi-funeral, complete with two of its cofounders, Melissa Blundell-Osorio and Laura Chaibongsai, flying back into town to participate.

“Gramps is such a special, unique place where we were able to build — and also be part of — such a wonderful community,” Blundell-Osorio, who now lives in Indiana, tells New Times. “I have very clear memories of getting to the end of Nerd Night, and you would see, obviously, the nerds in the audience, but also the metalheads heading into Shirley’s for a show and the drag queens getting ready for Double Stubble. Everyone was welcome, and everyone intermingled. You know, Miss Toto, who hosted Double Stubble, once gave a Nerd Nite presentation. So, it’s a huge loss to Miami. I knew I had to be there to say goodbye.” 

In some ways, the nerds have won. Hip, wry “edutainment” was so not a thing when Nerd Nite launched back in 2014 that a camera crew from NBC 6 came out to shoot video of this slightly sauced crowd sitting in a bar for lessons from seasoned experts and loveably eccentric autodidacts alike. It was a novelty in a way that is difficult to fully appreciate in the post-podcast, post-YouTube-essay era. 

“Miami has a reputation as a party town; one that’s obviously well-deserved in a lot of ways,” Blundell-Osorio says. “But I think the success of Nerd Nite showed that, beyond that cliché, there are as many intellectually curious people who love learning about random interesting things here as anywhere else. We never really had themed events; just, month after month, three new presentations on three new topics. It could be on drag, or metal music, or literature, or science, or pop culture, or geopolitics, or the history of rat beef — and people showed up regardless, with no real idea what they were getting into except a fun learning experience.”

Appropriately enough, the final edition includes “The Story of Gramps, Wynwood’s Best Bar,” a presentation by New Times contributor Liz Tracy. The day New Times chats with Blundell-Osorio, she’s Zooming in from frigid Bloomington, putting the finishing touches on her own presentation on cam girls based on research she has been working on at the famed sex and relationship-focused Kinsey Institute. It isn’t only the warmth of the sun she’s looking forward to when she crosses the threshold into the safe space for freethinkers, mainstream outcasts, and, yes, nerds, that she helped cultivate. 

“I’m very excited to come back,” she says. “Miami Nerd Nite just has this very special place in my heart. “Magical” is a good word. It had real magic around it. The events always went really well and worked out in ways you would not expect…I love doing Nerd Nite in Bloomington, but it’s just not quite the same. Maybe that’s just my attachment and memories speaking, but I don’t think so. It’s its own thing, and I’m ready to come back to Nerd Nite Miami and be with nerds of all kinds one more time.” 

The Last Nerd Nite at Gramps. 7 p.m. Thursday, December 18 at Gramps, 176 NW 24th St., Miami; 305-699-2669; gramps.com. Admission is free with RSVP via humanitix.com.