French-founded fragrance firm / TUE 3-3-20 / Grossly distorted imitation / City railways not at street level / Fraternal order with animal emblem

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:11 despite my typoing like every answer ... took me about six passes to get COTY into the grid properly, somehow, ugh ...)

THEME: various "stars" — various kinds of famous-people stars are clued as if they were other kinds of stars:

Theme answers:

• ANNIE OAKLEY (17A: Shooting star?)
• AL ROKER (37A: Morning star?)
• SIMONE BILES (59A: Gold star?)
• PAUL BUNYAN (10D: Giant star?)
• SANTA CLAUS (29D: Pole star?)

Word of the Day: YAW (40A: Veer off course, as a ship) —

1aof a ship : to deviate erratically from a course (as when struck by a heavy sea)especially : to move from side to side

bof an airplane, spacecraft, or projectile : to turn by angular motion about the vertical axis (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Lynn Lempel is a legendary early-week constructor and I'm happy to see her name again today. This isn't among my favorites of hers, mostly because the theme concept feels looser and less precisely executed than it usually is in her work. My main problem is with [Gold star?], which is the only "star" in the set that isn't an actual in-the-sky star. Rather, it is a sticker you get on exemplary homework in elementary school, or a Soviet-era insignia indicating "Hero" status. If "gold star" has an astronomical meaning, it must be pretty obscure. Doesn't come up on google searches. Whereas, shooting star? Sky. Morning star? Sky (refers to Sirius when it appears in the morning sky, but also Venus or (less often) Mercury when it does the same, thank you wikipedia). Giant star? Sky. And pole star? Sky (another word for the North Star, or Polaris, though also a metaphor meaning "guiding principle"). I'm thrilled to see SIMONE BILES whenever she wants to make a grid appearance, but [Gold star?] makes this set of themers clunk, and the set wasn't exactly tight to begin with. There's nothing holding the set together besides the star stuff, and three of these "stars" aren't even real people. They're fictional. I mean, have you ever actually seen an AL ROKER in person. I doubt it.


Almost all my trouble today (and there wasn't much of it) came in the center of the grid, where I could not think of a Disney dog in five letters starting with "G" and I could *not* think of a word for [Little devils] that wasn't IMPS. So let's take those one at a time. First ... GOOFY's a dog!? But ... Pluto's a dog! Isn't Pluto GOOFY's dog? How does a dog have a dog? Wait ... OK now I'm just reenacting this scene from "Stand By Me":


I threw BOAR athwart the Disney dog answer, hoping for clarity, but things just got worse, as GO___ seemed even less like a dog name, somehow, and now I had the "B" from BRATS but still no idea how to get to there from [Little devils], a clue that seems far too cutesy to describe actual BRATS, unless "Little devils" is some kind of tailgating slang for BRATS (as in bratwurst, as in sausages). Probably not, but I do like it and I am going to start calling sausages that.


Yesterday's puzzle was accompanied by a note:

To mark the beginning of Women's History Month, every puzzle this week (Monday to Sunday) has been made by a leading woman crossword constructor.

This sounds noble enough, but only the NYTXW would think to honor a "month" with a week's worth of puzzles. I mean, if that's not ... telling, I don't know what is. It's tokenism at its finest. It's also embarrassing, considering that another crossword—the syndicated Universal Crossword, edited by David Steinberg—is actually doing the whole month. All women constructors, all month long. He's calling it the Universal Crossword Women's March (solve or print puzzles out from here, or get them here in .puz format). Here's the line-up, which includes today's constructor, Lynn Lempel, and other familiar names, as well as a slew of debut constructors:

But sure, NYTXW, one week, great. You know what they call a week's worth of puzzles by men at the NYTXW? They call it ... a week. Just kidding, most weeks this year have featured at least one woman. To find a seven-day stretch of just men you have to go all the way back to ... Jan. 16-22, 2020. Olden times. Times of yore. And there's actually a more recent twelve-day stretch where only half a puzzle was constructed by a woman. But congrats on the progress, NYTXW. Baby steps, I guess.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]