What the trio in this puzzle's clues is trying to promote / MON 7-26-21 / Companion of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings / Devers three-time Olympic track gold medalist / Lead-in to gender

Constructor: Tommy Pauly

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)

[Don't mind all the little blue eyeballs—I closed the puzzle before taking a screenshot
and just didn't want to type all the answers in again, so I hit "Reveal All" and the blue
eyeballs are my punishment]

THEME: JAZZ / SHOW (1A: With 68-Across, what the trio in this puzzle's clues is trying to promote) — clues imagine different members of a jazz trio saying different things ... what they are saying is basically idioms involving instruments:

Theme answers:

• 20A: The first member of the trio said he'd ... TOOT HIS OWN HORN
• 38A: The second member of the trio said he'd ... PULL SOME STRINGS
• 53A: The third member of the trio said she'd ... DRUM UP BUSINESS

Word of the Day: GAIL Devers (62A: ___ Devers, three-time Olympic track gold medalist) —

Yolanda Gail Devers (/ˈdiːvərz/ DEE-vərz; born November 19, 1966) is an American retired track and field athlete. A two-time Olympic champion in the 100 meters for the USA, her 1996 win made her only the second woman (after Wyomia Tyus) to successfully defend an Olympic 100m title. She won a third Olympic gold medal in the 4 × 100 m relay in 1996. She is also the 1993 World champion in the 100m and a three-time World champion in the 100m hurdles. In 2011, she was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. (wikipedia)

• • •

Somehow, the SHOW part of the reveal feels really anticlimactic. I wanted something snappier. It seemed arbitrary, the SHOW part. Not sure why the revealer wasn't JAZZ / TRIO, since that's the heart of the puzzle. Just rewrite the theme clues to take "trio" out of them, and bam, you're in business. JAZZ / TRIO is a much snappier revealer than JAZZ / SHOW, which is a bit of a thud. Most jazz trios have pianos as part of their makeup. Pianist + double bass + drummer is pretty standard. But horn (sax, in particular) + bass + drums has been the set-up for some notable trios, so the "show" being put on here is perfectly plausible. But the execution of this theme just felt slightly off, in a number of ways. First, the aforementioned weak revealer. Second, the fact that the first two theme answers are idioms, but they literally describe what the jazz musicians do, whereas DRUM UP BUSINESS stays solidly in the idiomatic world. Third, "horn" and "drum(s)" are actual words you'd use to describe jazz instruments, but "strings" is a word more associated with orchestra sections. So no matter how you slice this theme, from whatever angle you look at it, it feels mildly off. I think there's a good core idea here (even if I'm not really the biggest fan of these types of pun puzzles). The execution just doesn't feel as polished as it might be. 

The fill is much more of a problem. Just dead on its feet, for the most part. I really like SEA LEGS (28A: Ability to keep one's balance on a ship), but everything else is just taking up space, and for a puzzle that's this easy to fill, there really shouldn't be so so so much weak short stuff. I mean, when CHEWY looks positively electric compared to the vast majority of your fill, you have a bit of an energy problem on your hands. APSO EPEE SSNS before we even get out of the NW. And then just a slew of overfamiliar repeaters (ELAL ATEAT ESS ISH etc.), none of them terrible, but in bulk, they're really deadening. Beyond the three long themers, the grid has only two 7s, and everything else is 6 letters or fewer. You don't give yourself any room to shine when you build a grid like this, a grid with no non-themers over 7 (and only two of those). 

Today's theme type (punny phrases with very non-specific clueing) made this puzzle slightly tougher to solve than your typical Monday, but then the clueing on the non-theme stuff was so easy that it all pretty much averaged out to a normal Monday difficulty level. Almost all the struggle in this puzzle, for me, came in trying to parse the first themer. Without anything specific to help you in the themer clues, you have to figure out the phrases from crosses, and for that first themer I had TOOTHIS and wow, no idea what I was looking at. Brain wanted "TOO THIS" or "TOOTH IS" and then brain was out of ideas. Such a strange letter string to start the puzzle, given that you can turn it into two words *three different ways*. Eventually, my brain was able to imagine the space between the "T" and the "H" and I was off and running. Had SNEAK (34A: Move stealthily), then changed it to SKULK when I (bizarrely) thought Lou Gehrig's disease was LDS (my apologies to Lou Gehrig and the Mormon church), then had to change SKULK back to SNEAK, so that was awful. Never know if it's ENURE or INURE, so that's awful for different reasons (26D: Accustom). Misspelled LIEGE as "LEIGE," which is ... sad. It's SIEGE ... but SEIZE ... and somewhere in that spelling logic vortex, by analogy, I messed up LIEGE. Luckily, it was a brief snag. Made up a lot of time on the bottom third, where the 6s all went in bam bam bam off their first letters, and everything else down there was very straightforward. Gonna go watch a movie and hang out with my FELINEs now. See you later.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Nice that they thought to make the third member of the jazz trio a woman. I see you trying, NYTXW!

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