Craft Show - The New York Times

Deb Amlen and Caitlin Lovinger are on assignment. The Sunday column was written by the New York Times editor, intrepid solver and recently converted constructor, Helen T. Verongos.

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SUNDAY PUZZLE — She had me at 36D, and I knew it would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That clue was the first to catch my eye when I started to solve this puzzle by Ruth Bloomfield Margolin, and I was thrilled to recognize a reference to one of my favorite classic films. I started solving this puzzle in the middle, happy to get a long themer so early in the game.

Not surprisingly, I soon had to backtrack because of a mistaken guess about where the clues were leading me, although the trip in both directions offered entrancing rabbit holes.

Tricky Clues

Solving this puzzle didn’t make my head hurt. Rather, the complexity was in the layering of steps and instructions. Nonetheless, there were several clever takes like 41D, “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, for two” — two REDHEADS, that is. And the one-two punch clue “Little sucker,” at 12A, and “Little suckers,” at 36A, stumped me not once but twice as I thought of leeches and dupes before alighting on VAC and LICE. Could it be that lice suck blood? Yes, and you can catch them from head-to-head contact, so enough with the head butting.

It was refreshing to see the Black female all-stars IDA B. Wells (20A) and Zora NEALE Hurston (122A), as well as the Black male performer Leslie ODOM Jr. (73A).

But 98D struck me as an odd choice in such a forward-looking puzzle.

Juliet Rylance as Della Street and Matthew Rhys as Perry Mason in the new HBO “Perry Mason” series.Credit...Merrick Morton/HBO

As for female representation, it stretched into the fictional in this puzzle, with 103D, DELLA Street, Perry Mason’s secretary no more. She is now reincarnated as the person truly in charge in the new TV series, and both she and Hamilton Burger reflect more up-to-date, if subtle depictions of a wider spectrum of sexual orientations than the original Perry Mason (probably) ever dreamed of.

By the time I figured out the answer to 30A, “Baseball catcher,” I was smiling; I didn’t have to dredge up some name from the Brooklyn Dodgers roster. The answer was a pleasant, forehead-smacker of a surprise. Taken together, all this got me thinking that maybe it’s time to devise a variation on the Bechdel Test for crosswords. Do you think it would fare well?

Today’s Theme

What do you get when you cross geometry with a GPS? I don’t know, but Ms. Margolin does, and she moves it from the realm of the abstract to the concrete with ease.

If you’re a scattershot solver who doesn’t travel linearly through the grid, you might be slowed down by some seemingly unrelated clues set in looming bold italics: Say, good old 36D, “Rick, Ilsa and Victor had one in ‘Casablanca’” — which is, of course, LOVE TRIANGLE. Then you land on 48A, with its similarly presented clue “Winter vacation destination,” and QUARANTINE is too long, as is MY SHE SHED. But guess what fits. Yes, SKI SLOPE. Naturally, this led me to look for something connecting Ingrid Bergman or Humphrey Bogart and skiing, which quickly took me back to a tense scene between Bergman and Gregory Peck (playing a tortured psychiatric patient) in another classic, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

But movies from the 1940s was not our category, Alex. As I pressed on, the next bold italic clue, 113A, “Civic center,” or TOWN SQUARE, set us firmly in the framework of geometry, and revealed the link between the triangle and the slope.

That’s the easy part. The tough part is the mapping, connecting the dots that start with the revealer, 66A, clued as “In perfect order … or, as two words, what’s formed by applying the answers for the five italicized clues to the circled letters.”

That took some thinking (how do you apply an answer to a circle on the grid?). Then some drawing. And some erasing. And some printouts. And, since the power company decided to switch off electricity to our side of the street when the lights came on across the way, some candles and a little (socially distant) help from good friends. (Thank you, friends!) The lights came back on about an hour after the deadline panic began and not two days later, as the electric utility had informed us it would.

In darkness or in light, have a pencil ready. Some of my attempts to connect the dots to make this ship shape were less than shipshape. If nothing else, you will appreciate the skill it takes to make a grid that floats.

Constructor Note

It probably comes as no surprise that the biggest challenge in making this puzzle was creating the grid.

There was a lot of thematic material to fit in: seven actual theme answers and five additional geometric elements. And to maintain symmetry, I couldn’t place any blocks symmetrically opposite any circled letters. All in all, this made for a lot of constraints to work with in fitting this puzzle together.

Will and his team’s first response to the theme was quite positive, if only I could improve the fill. We went back and forth several times as I tried to maximize the number of interesting words and minimize the number of words that I would have preferred not to use at all.

I hope that the balance we achieved satisfies most solvers, and I hope that the graphic reward at the end more than compensates for a few unappealing entries.

It is always fun to see how the editorial crew tweaks the clues and comes up with some gems of their own (89A!), but of course I enjoy seeing my favorites appear in print. In particular, I’m happy that “S as in soup?” for NOODLE and “Event that’s a bit off?” for SALE made the cut. Finally, to my artist friend who — when I was immobilized by a broken ankle — urged me to take up painting and couldn’t really accept crossword construction as a similarly creative pursuit: Look, I did both!

Was That a Distress Call?

Our crew will help you, if you don’t mind some spoilers. Subscribers can click here for a peek at the answer key.

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