Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!

I've been sick this week. Stomach sick but just cramping. But many things have happened in the time I've been away from my keyboard. I attempted, and failed, to get through the delightful Simon Russell Beale's King Lear as it was performed on the west end. I thought I was doing so well until I hit pause and saw that I still had an hour and a half left, and as lovely as Mr. Beale was in those tall boots and the fascist overcoat, I could bear no more. I let myself down by not being one of the enlightened who enjoys these modern takes on Shakespeare where people are dressed in suits and fancy cocktail dresses. More Succession than Shakespeare in Love.

I found myself wondering if I would need to dip out of the show at intermission were I to see it live, and I don't think I would. Watching a play on a screen just doesn't have that same energy as it does seeing it live. But there is a maybe there.

I think I got sick from something I ate on Tuesday, when an old, and I guess ridiculously wealthy, friend of my husband took us to swim at his "new condo" in Esparza, Costa Rica. But it was a little sad. There was no new condo, yet. The development hadn't been developed much at all and the pool was tiny. It was attached to a small covered pavilion with a grill and tables and chairs, but it was surrounded by nothing except empty roads and lawn maintenance people constantly buzzing away with their weed-whackers. They don't care for riding lawn mowers here, and I can only imagine it is because they will be mistaken for Uber Eats drivers, or as my husband has taken to calling them: motosquitoes. The whole subdivision reminded me of the neighborhood I lived in during high school during one of Houston's oil busts except with iguanas or caimans. Oh and as an aside (as if this entire post isn't an aside) we found that when birds are given Cheetos, they will use the water of a highly chlorinated swimming pool to soften the offered pieces. Costa Rica truly is nature at its finest.

But what horror! Even though we picked out our bathing suits to wear, we forgot to pack them. My husband and his friend zipped off to find bathing suits for us in a shop that, based on my knowledge of said friend, would not be a place that actually sells bathing suits. When they returned, they had basketball shorts, and we swam in them, and that's fine.

But during the day there were three culprits for my stomach woes. At breakfast we ate at a pleasant Soda. Typical fare for Costa Rica: Gallo Pinto, a ball of solid burnt bacon, bananas that are actually sweet plantains, and other stuff I can't remember. Lunch was a chicken Caesar salad for me because I thought we were trying to save money while my two companions both ordered steaks. I had sangria... could have been the apple bits floating in the chilled sweet wine. We closed the afternoon off with a surprise I'm saving for another post because it was so dumbfoundingly perplexing that it deserves its own energy. And it could have been this... thing, but I suspect it was the lukewarm salad or the shady apple bits.

While sick, I also watched the terrific The Hospital with George C. Scott and Dame Diana Rigg. It was released way back in 1971, but it's as prescient as a movie can be.

It's also supposed to be darkly funny. Paddy Chayefsky certainly wrote the hell out of it. He even won an Oscar, not that those mean much these days. It's very well acted and stuffed with great character work from Richard Dysart, Bernard Hughes, and Stephen Elliot. Rigg and Scott are terrific in anything, but there is that weird 70s sexual assault to lovers moment that really makes you want to scream.

What really makes me scream though is that this movie encapsulates just about everything I hate about the United States Healthcare system. Yes, I have written about Costa Rica's own shortcomings when it comes to healthcare, but at least here, there's very little money involved unless you go private. While people at the time might think that The Hospital was darkly comic, it seems horrifying today. At least they could have made their doctors get hair cuts for christ's sake.

My stomach is still in a rut, but it seems to be getting better with each passing day. I can't say the same for the patients at the titular hospital at the center of the movie, but they probably didn't have the right insurance.