Actress Wells has just entered the scene / TUE 1-5-21 / TV father Cleaver has just left the starting line / Classic NYC punk rock venue / Petite pooch familiarly

Constructor: Amy Schecter and Christina Iverson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: famous people doing things — familiar 3rd-person verb phrases are clued as if they express what someone famous is currently doing; that is, the first word (a 3rd-person verb ending in "S") is clued as if it were preceded by an apostrophe:

Theme answers:

• PAT'S DOWN (16A: Singer Benatar feels blue)
• SUE'S OVER (20A: Author Grafton has arrived for dinner)
• DAWN'S ON (26A: Actress Wells has just entered the scene)
• JACK'S UP (!) (37A: Actor Nicholson will bat next)
• WADE'S IN (48A: Baseball's Boggs has agreed to join us)
• CHUCK'S IT (53A: Actor Norris got tagged)
• WARD'S OFF (59A: TV father Cleaver has just left the starting line)

Word of the Day: TERN (35D: Relative of a sea gull) —

Terns are seabirds in the family Laridae that have a worldwide distribution and are normally found near the sea, rivers, or wetlands. Terns are treated as a subgroup of the family Laridae which includes gulls and skimmers and consist of eleven genera. They are slender, lightly built birds with long, forked tails, narrow wings, long bills, and relatively short legs. Most species are pale grey above and white below, with a contrasting black cap to the head, but the marsh terns, the Inca tern, and some noddies have dark plumage for at least part of the year. The sexes are identical in appearance, but young birds are readily distinguishable from adults. Terns have a non-breeding plumage, which usually involves a white forehead and much-reduced black cap.

The terns are birds of open habitats that typically breed in noisy colonies and lay their eggs on bare ground with little or no nest material. Marsh terns construct floating nests from the vegetation in their wetland habitats, and a few species build simple nests in trees, on cliffs or in crevices. The white tern, uniquely, lays its single egg on a bare tree branch. Depending on the species, one to three eggs make up the clutch. Most species feed on fish caught by diving from flight, but the marsh terns are insect-eaters, and some large terns will supplement their diet with small land vertebrates. Many terns are long-distance migrants, and the Arctic tern may see more daylight in a year than any other animal.

Terns are long-lived birds and are relatively free from natural predators and parasites; most species are declining in numbers due directly or indirectly to human activities, including habitat loss, pollution, disturbance, and predation by introduced mammals. The Chinese crested tern is in a critical situation and three other species are classed as endangered. (wikipedia)

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***HELLO, READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS!**. The calendar has turned on another year (thank God), and while that might mean a lot of things to a lot of people, for me it means it's time for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask regular readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. Last year at this time, I wrote about what a melancholy year 2019 was; my oldest dog had died and the world was kind of a wreck. And then 2020 happened, and I learned what a real wreck looks like. In February, my other dog died (R.I.P. Gabby). And then, well, COVID. And let's be honest, even with a new president, 2021 is going to be, uh, challenging as well. But I hope that the regular ritual of solving crosswords brought some solace and stability to your lives this past year, and I hope that my blog added to your enjoyment of the solving experience in some way. This year my blog will celebrate its 15th anniversary! I feel so proud! And old! A lot of labor goes into producing this blog every day (Every. Day.) and the hours are, let's say, less than ideal (I'm either solving and writing at night, after 10pm, or in the morning, before 6am). Most days, I really do love the writing, but it is work, and once a year (right now!) I acknowledge that fact. As I've said before, I have no interest in "monetizing" the blog beyond a simple, direct contribution request once a year. No ads, no gimmicks. Just here for you, every day, rain or shine, whether you like it or, perhaps, on occasion, not :) It's just me and my laptop and some free blogging software and, you know, a lot of rage, but hopefully some insight and levity along the way. I do genuinely love this gig, and whether you're an everyday reader or a Sunday-only reader or a flat-out hatereader, I appreciate you more than you'll ever know.

How much should you give? Whatever you think the blog is worth to you on a yearly basis. Whatever that amount is is fantastic. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are two options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):

Second, a mailing address (checks should be made out to "Rex Parker"):

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905

And heck, why don't I throw my Venmo handle in here too, just in case that's your preferred way of moving money around; it's @MichaelDavidSharp (the last four digits of my phone are 4878, in case Venmo asks you, which they did that one time someone contributed that way—but it worked!)

All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. I. Love. Snail Mail. I love seeing your gorgeous handwriting and then sending you my awful handwriting. It's all so wonderful. And my thank-you postcards this year are really special. They are portraits of my new cat Alfie (a bright spot of 2020), designed by artist Ella Egan, a.k.a. my daughter. And they look like this:

He's eating kale in that middle one, in case you're wondering. Anyway, these cards are personally meaningful to me, and also, I believe, objectively lovely. I can't wait to share them with the snail-mailers. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just indicate "NO CARD."  Again, as ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support. Now on to today's puzzle...

* * *

This theme mostly works, except for the one place it doesn't. No, let me rephrase. It works, roughly, on its own terms, but those are not the only terms it feels like it's working on when you're solving, so (to my ear) there is one big clanker in this themer group. I wonder if I did a poll and just asked, "Which of these ... [counting] ... seven (!) is substantially not like the others?" there'd be a consensus. Anyway, the problem is CHUCK'S IT. All the other final words are prepositions. Conspicuously, obviously so. And "IT" ... is not. It's just not. The preposition thing felt absolutely crucial the entire time I was solving, as one after the other of the themers was built that way: famous person + apostrophe S + preposition. On and on. And on. Until Chuck. Poor Chuck. Also, poor Dawn Wells. She was the first themer I got, and so the whole endeavor started out slightly sad; in case you hadn't heard, Dawn Wells died just last week. Dec. 30, 2020. Dawn Wells was of course famous for playing Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island." I always hated that whole Ginger *vs* Mary Ann thing, since there's no reason to pit women against each other like that. And yet the answer was always Mary Ann :)

I was briefly and (probably) unintentionally amused, in a 10-year-old-boy kind of way, when I saw the verb/preposition pattern develop ... and then hit JACK. If you played a quick word association game, or ... was it "Match Game" where they made you guess the most popular fill-in-the-blank answer? Anyway, if you'd played that game with me, and asked me to quickly complete [JACKS ___], let's just say "Up" is not the place my brain would've gone to first. So I mentally filled the squares with the wrong preposition and got a laugh. But the real answer was UP. Jack got UP. Not OFF. UP. But then Ward Cleaver got OFF and I was laughing all over again.   

What else? I'm stuck on prepositions. I don't want there to be any other prepositions in this puzzle *besides* the ones that complete the theme answers, and I especially don't want any other two-word verb phrases ending in a preposition (looking at you, END AT). Keep your theme tight and don't let parts of it leak into the fill ... I always say! I had a little trouble getting the OVER part of SUE'S OVER, but otherwise, the themers were all quite easy. But since they all involved "celebrities," and the well-known-ness of those can be highly variable, it's possible that the theme wasn't always easy for you. I wonder how many people under 40 know who Dawn Wells was. Or Ward Cleaver, for that matter. Oh, yeah, the other odd-man-out themer (besides the Chuck Norris one that annoyed me) was the Ward Cleaver one, since he's fictional, and the other famous people are not. Further: OMAN does not sound like the exclamation in question, so since the clue didn't not specifically indicate *looks* like, that clue was no good (2D: Country whose name can be an exclamation). I guess with the right (Jamaican?) accent, OMAN can be an exclamation. Bah. The "successive identical clue" strategy once again shows its head and shows why it's generally bad, as the clue (44D & 46D: Trial stages) works really well for one of the answers (BETAS) and really iffily for the other (the ultra-generic TESTS). I thought the SW corner was the most fun, with its shot and CHASER and GNOMES shouting "TEACH ME to JETSKI!" (OK I fudged the last bit, it's JETSKIED, but my brain hears what it hears). Have a nice day!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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