NOTE: working on fixing whatever the heck is wrong with Disqus.

There are a few places to have breakfast. Wife goes to Piacere, the bakery, because it’s en route to tennis, and she has to get to tennis. Sometimes she comes to Isla Blanca with me. Yes, Isla Blanca, home of Show Cooking.

I don’t know that means, exactly, other than “there’s a few guys sweating like the damned working a grill for an unending stream of hungry blank-faced people who have plates in their hands.” I could eat the prepped eggs or French toast or any of a hundred things, but as I noted before, the hotel was sold a thousand red bulbs that had been billed as heat lamps, and either they haven’t figured it out yet, or they’re just going to use up the bulbs before they get proper ones.

Everything is lukewarm. I learned long ago to head for the omelette station and endure the weight. So I’m heading for the first one, and I see a party of four vectoring in towards the same destination. I double my step but fail. But then I see that the other grill has no customers. I head over. The cook says “Five minutes.” Sigh. Back to the other line, which now has three more people. Despair.

Eventually I get it, and try the French toast. It’s . . . it’s fresh! This is the best breakfast I’ve had in a long time. The day is off to an exceptional start. Thus refueled, I take to the pool, and read and splash for an hour. Eventually I wander down to the beach, and head into the ocean.

That’s when it all clicked. That’s when the same-old-done-this feeling evaporated and zen bliss flooded into the day. Just bobbing in the swell.

Lunch at Poseidon with post-tennis Wife.

This place is better than Isla Blanca, and it often has lizards and birds who dart from the margins to get some grub. Let’s take a look.

They have a guy working a huge pot of meats for tacos, and some hot salsas. So it’s that and a crisp salad, then the parade of inscrutable desserts.

Not as good as cruise ships, really - more congealed, not as much in the cake factor. A few bites suffice. Take three! Have one bite of each. Be a profligate Westerner!

After a while, the gym. Here I really pounded it - twice the length of the treadmill; as is the custom, one song, then one episode of Johnny Dollar 5-part serial, then a few more songs. This time I’m listening to a group I just discovered called Cafe De Belugas.

Hip hip! Chin chin!

Then machines, all of which are slightly different than the ones I use, so different muscles are complaining about this pointless effort. The results are good, though; the young fellow running the gym said I must do this a lot because I’m in really good shape, really cut. Underestimated my age by a decade and a half, but what do young people know. I have received exactly two (2) compliments in my life on gym work and they’ve both been in this gym. It is hence a special place, because it fills the unslakeable void hollowed out by being a fat kid.

I just wish the compliments hadn't been immediately followed by a timeshare pitch. Kinda tainted the sentiment, I guess.

Last order of the afternoon: go write at the lobby bar. That’s where the waiter remembered me. A good full first day. The usual beauty.

But hardly over. Tonight is special! Tonight is . . . SEX BINGO!

The resort has the obligatory caberet, where good dancers wearing a minimum of clothing prance around for an ungodly amount of time - three hours is the usual show, and let’s just say they could have cut the “salute to the 20th century, decade by decade” third act or whatever that was. CHIC BINGO was a new addition, and it cost much less than regular CHIC, because there was no special food. (The food was not special.) We signed up because it was something to do in the evening.

First, though, the steakhouse, joined by a tennis partner of Sara’s. he difficulty of adding one more to the reservation that was amusing - they just couldn’t. Mind you, the place is half empty. It had something to do with kitchen logistics - utterly impossible to slap one more hunk of cow on the grill. It was eight and he hadn’t arrived, which, to me, the punctual North Dakotan, meant “too bad, let’s eat.” But there might be a cancellation! A no-show! Can you wait until 8:20? Well, we have SEX BINGO at nine, so we’ll have to rush.

We ordered the exact same thing so they wouldn’t take time deciding which plate went where; that would shave off ten seconds. It was delicious.

Off to big theater, off the main drag of the Village. Once admitted behind the velvet rope, we were given one (1) Bingo card, and a fruity drink in a champagne glass.

The show took 15 minutes to start. Fifteen minutes of music, loud, while two dancers stood near the stage and moved in a most desultory fashion. Again with the bondage gear. The guy in the booth in front was snapping pictures of the male dancer, who looked like Chris Elliott. I recognized two of the dancers from our last trip - a haughty Teutonic Ilsa She-Wolf, and a Jennifer-Beals type. Eventually the MC bounds out, and he’s obviously auditioning for a TV game show job or something bigger than this. I mean, not bad, high energy, good patter. He announced that the point of this was to win money, yes, but primarily to get good and drunk, and that the more drunk we got, the more fun we would have.

He was partly correct. It’s diminishing returns after a while.

So he’d read five numbers then stop for a “Guess that Tune” segment that hauled up audience members, who would sing the song and get coins as payment. The person or group with the most cards would win a bottle of tequila. So we basically paid to see karaoke.

There was also SEXY DANCING and then more numbers and then hip-hip-hooray, a round of shots for everyone in the theater. (Tequila watered down with fruity juice.) Canapes made two appearances. More numbers. Guess that tune. Some hams got up and really played the crowd; the guy who had been taking snaps of Chris Elliot;s glutes was part of a party of singles, and they were here to get NAUGHTY and HAMMERED, so they ended up on stage a lot. Then more numbers -

BINGO, shouts my wife, and runs for the stage to claim her prize. You had to grab a ceremonial hat and shout something in Spanish, probably filthy. So you’ve filled the crowd full of booze and then you make them run up the stairs. I’m sure we signed waivers somewhere. Anyway, she tripped a little, but Chris Elliot caught her and she made it to the main stage and threw back her arms in victory and triumph. This, of course, I text to Daughter, who has this semi-annual “oh my folks are humans too” moment when I send her something from the vacation. Last time it was video from a midnight rave, with her Mother dancing with elegance and abandon. These pictures or videos - like the one I sent at the start of the show, with the proclamation of SEX BINGO - invariably get a WHAT in reply.

It went on for fargin’ ever, and culminated in a dance-off between some audience faves, one of whom was a grinning nerd and the other was a stout woman strategically underdressed in tight reds fabric. The audience had firmly rejected the compatriot of the guy who was taking the picture of Chris Elliot, because he had interpreted one of the dance instructions as a license to hump the stage, and no one wanted to see that. He reminded me of Bubbles from Big Brother, the UK version, which I never saw, but he appeared on an Office UK Reunion show and I always remembered him, a hapless grinning bloke who had a moment of unexpected fame, possibly because he fell over a chair.

The crowd liked the Asian nerd guy, who had an endearing grin and made that stupid peace - heart gestures, but another flight of shots had circulated through the theater and people seemed more likely to endorse the short undressed woman, who responded to her victory by getting on her hands and knees and twerking her gelatinous fundament at everyone, then walking off with a sultry expression that suggested we had been tremendously lucky to behold this spectacular moment of cultural enrichment.

There were also flashing glasses. Balloons. Confetti, which got tracked into the room.

It was different. It was, for a while, fun, on both an ironic and non-ironic moment. I was one number away from winning the grand prize, and before it was announced I stood and mapped out my route to the stage, and crouched as if ready to bolt. This earned me an imitation and a smile from Jennifer Beals, who I’m sure loves me and thinks me fascinating and sexy.

A good day! Something different. Tomorrow: no idea.

But I have my suspicions. Maybe we will reenact Norse rituals around a dark and powerful tree.