Machete-like knife / FRI 7-29-22 / Ma Belle 1970 #5 hit / Acoustic flourishes during a comic's set / Liquid weapon or a solid one / Dishes served in the final scene of Titus Andronicus / First Hebrew prophet to have a biblical book named for him / Fun times between the sheets

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TAMRON Hall (25A: ___ Hall, former "Today" host with a self-titled daytime talk show) —

Tamron Hall (born September 16, 1970) is an American broadcast journalist and television talk show host. In September 2019, Hall debuted her self-titled syndicated daytime talk show, which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award. Hall was formerly a national news correspondent for NBC News, daytime anchor for MSNBC, host of the program MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall, and a co-host of Today's Take, the third hour of Today. She hosts Deadline: Crime on Investigation Discovery channel. In summer 2016, Investigation Discovery premiered the TV special Guns on Campus: Tamron Hall Investigates, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the tower shooting at the University of Texas at Austin.

• • •

My grid screenshots usually feature a highlighted word, which has no significance beyond the fact that it's usually the last answer I got (the software highlights whatever answer you're working on). This is why so often the highlighted word appears at the bottom of the grid—I tend to solve from top to bottom, you know, like normal people. And usually this highlighted word, this last word I got, is a short word. Longer answers may be tough to get a grip on at times, but they also tend to topple with only a few letters in place, and certainly when you've got the vast majority of a long answer, unless it's a proper noun you've never heard of with an uninferrable spelling, that answer typically reveals itself quickly. But today, hoo boy. OK, let me back up and say that I think this is a good puzzle, with amazing marquee answers, all the colloquial, chatty goodness I expect from a Robyn Weintraub puzzle ("IT'S ME AGAIN!" "I SPOKE TOO SOON!" "DRINKS ARE ON ME!" "COME ON DOWN!" "APRIL FOOLS!"). Vibrant, lively stuff. It seemed like there was just ... more short fill today, or maybe the clues on it were just almost-all-over tricky / fussy, or maybe I just missed the cluing wavelength, but the solve felt a little more plodding, a little less whoosh-whoosh than Robyn's puzzles often feel.  But "plodding" is too harsh—I mean plodding by comparison to that fantastic longer stuff. Anyway, highly enjoyable, as usual. Until the end, when I came to a dead stop: two blank squares and no IDEA. 

Unsurprisingly, the primary problem involved interpreting a "?" clue, sigh. I've got -O-A PARTIES at 25D: Fun times between the sheets? and I cannot for the life of me figure out what word that is up front. Worse, I've got TAMRON as CAMRON (25A: ___ Hall, former "Today" host with a self-titled daytime talk show) and RAGES as RAVES (31A: Blows wildly), so my first answer there ends up being COVA PARTIES, which sounds like, what, parties where your friends come over and intentionally catch COVID from you? Are there "sheets" because you are all in bed sick? I have no idea. At some point I managed to both pull the "C" from CAMRON *and* imagine RAGES as a possibility instead of RAVES, and so finally I saw TOGA, but honestly, before that, I was like, "... SOFA PARTIES? What is happening!?" Do people still have TOGA PARTIES? I feel like that fad peaked 45 years ago, with "Animal House," and has been slowly and/or quickly waning since. TOGA PARTIES are a phenomenon that (apparently) completely dropped off my radar.

Mistakes? Yes. ENOS before AMOS (22D: First Hebrew prophet to have a biblical book named for him). Wait ... that might be the only actual mistake until the TOGA fiasco at the end. I definitely struggled a bit here and there. Didn't comprehend the AKA clue at all (24D: Lead-in to a street name, perhaps) until I realized "street" was metaphorical (i.e. "street name" as in "alias," as opposed to "given name"), and not, like, Elm Street or something. I read "autumn" as "aluminum" in 42D: Candy brand with autumn-colored packaging and still got REESE'S easily, though I did make a "huh? strange..." face, I'm pretty sure. I don't think I knew that BOLO was anything except a string tie, but (unfortunately) I *have* been to a SBARRO or two in my life, so BOLO didn't buh-low up the puzzle up for me. Oh, and I wrote in ABET instead of ASST for some reason. Instinct, probably. My fingers just got ahead of my brain (2D: One who helps out briefly). Something about helping out, starting "A" and ending "T"? No way you're going to keep my hands from trying ABET, even if it isn't even the right part of speech for the clue.

I've seen the [Hall of fame] clue for DARYL (and ARSENIO et al) before, so the [Hall of fame collaborator?] clue was transparent to me, but it's still cute. I don't love the punctuation on it. It seems to be in a kind of grammatical no-man's-land, which explains the "?." I also don't love that "Hall-of-Fame collaborator" doesn't really mean anything, as a base phrase, collaborating not being a thing there is a Hall of Fame for. And yet I love Hall & OATES (who I guess prefer to be called by their official name, Daryl Hall & John OATES?—I learned this from Mark Goodman (probably) on Sirius XM's "80s on 8" channel): "Though they are commonly referred to as Hall & Oates, Hall has been adamant about the duo being called Daryl Hall & John Oates – its official name" (wikipedia). So there you go. Christopher Adams will be with you tomorrow, and then I'll be rejoining you from the shores of Lake Michigan on Sunday. See you then.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Breakout was an actual video game, which is the key to (fully) understanding 1A: Breakout company of the 1970s (ATARI).

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