April showers bring May flowers, as they say, and since we’re still in the month of May, we’ve got a spring-themed puzzle today. Six theme answers feature circled words that grow one letter at a time:
- 24A: [*Musical for which Yul Brynner won a Tony Award] is THE KING AND I.
- 37A: [*Get involved with, as other people’s business] is STICK YOUR NOSE IN.
- 58A: [*Author of the 1989 techno-thriller “The Ransom of Black Stealth One”] is DEAN ING.
- 69A: [*Certain navel piercing] is BELLY BUTTON RING.
- 103A: [*Filipina media personality who created a self-titled podcast about adulting] is JOYCE PRING.
- 107A: [*Series of uprisings in the early 2010s that began in Tunisia] is ARAB SPRING.
The revealer at 117A: [Period of agricultural development, and a hint to the progression seen in the starred answers’ last words] is GROWING SEASON, which describes the growth of the word SPRING from one letter to six. I did not know either DEAN ING or JOYCE PRING before writing this puzzle, but their last names came in handy to make the progression work.
This is sort of the opposite version of my “Field Work” puzzle from last June, where the letters of GRASS got cut down one letter at a time with the letters of BLADE from a lawn mower. It might have been a bit odd that I grew the SPRING letters starting in the middle at I, proceeding to the G, and then finishing at the beginning with S, but I liked this route better than the alternatives. For instance, I might have used phrases that start with S, then SP, then SPR, etc. — but that wouldn’t have been constraining enough. I could have picked any number of phrases among thousands in that situation, so I thought it made for a more cohesive set where the last words could start with one letter and grow to six letters.
And though I didn’t plan it beforehand, if you drew a straight lines connecting the bottom circled words to the top ones, I think they form the rough outline of a tree. I’m channeling my inner Bob Ross to say this puzzle painted a happy little tree right over there.
Some other answers and clues:
- 35A: [People in a crowd?] is TRIO. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.
- 41A: [Mystic or Wizard, e.g.] is ATHLETE. The NBA playoffs are starting, and though I was bummed that my hometown Bulls didn’t make it in, there are few things in basketball that I find more entertaining than watching Russell Westbrook dominate a game from start to finish. So, we’ll see how he and the Wizards do against the Sixers, which is the team I live closest to now.
- 86A: ["___ do, pig. ___ do.” (final line of dialogue from “Babe”)] is THAT’LL. When I first built the grid, my first reaction was that this answer was a compromise to make the better answers around it work and that it would be preferable to find something better. And then I remembered that I could clue it as a piece of one of the most memorable lines from “Babe.” It’s one that always makes me laugh. I guess pays to be lucky, sometimes.
- In the same section of the grid, 112A is ANKH and 123A is EYE, and they both have the clue [Hieroglyphics symbol]. I didn’t plan this, but I thought it was an interesting pairing.
- 124A: [Whom Homer once referred to as “stupid sexy Flanders”] is NED Flanders. This comes from one of my favorite Homer-and-Ned scenes, where Ned describes his skintight skiing outfit as though he’s wearing “nothing at all.” The clue for NADA at 101D: [Nothing at all] was another wink to that scene, by the way, and you can watch it here.
- 1D: [Real deal?] is STEAL. I thought it was funny how both words in the clue could rhyme with the answer.
- 17D: [Make clear in writing?] is ERASE. Whenever I have a fairly unconstrained corner like this, I’ll do what I can to work in an answer where I’ve stored away a clue that I like. I’d been sitting on this clue for about a month and this was a good time to use it.
- 72D: [Musical with Munkustrap and Old Deuteronomy] is CATS. It brings me no pleasure to admit that the “Cats” movie — the “Cats” movie — was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic shut everything down. And yet it had a certain marketing genius. They made a film so laughably bad that now, every time CATS shows up as an answer in my puzzles, my first inclination is to find a new way to refer to the musical instead of the real-life animals. Poor cats. This lifelong cat owner thinks they got a raw deal.
- 74D: [Hunky-dory] is PEACHY-KEEN and 78D: [Residential deliveries?] is HOME BIRTHS. Because the lower two corners were relatively closed off from the rest of the puzzle, I had some freedom to pick some less-than-common answers like these.
- 82D: [Repli-Kate in the 2002 National Lampoon film “Repli-Kate,” e.g.] is CLONE. Funny story about this clue. When I first looked it up, I noticed that the director of this movie was named Frank Longo. I happen to know a highly-regarded puzzle constructor by the same name, and I figured there’s no way that’s the same guy. And yet for some reason, the Wikipedia article on “Repli-Kate” links to the Frank Longo that I know. The IMDb page for the director of “Repli-Kate” doesn’t exactly clear things up, either — there’s no picture or biographical information. It’s still seems impossible, in my opinion. He writes a ton of puzzles and this interview from 2020 says he’s a former piano teacher with no mention of a film directing career. Occam’s razor tells me it’s just the wrong Wikipedia link. But … a puzzle writer can dream, right?
What did you think?
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May 23, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Solution to Evan Birnholz’s May 23 Post Magazine crossword, “Development Time” - The Washington Post
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