Nonalcoholic mixed drink / MON 3-13-23 / Creatures that helped make Cinderella's dress / Country that's home to the Inca Trail

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium (as a Downs-only solve)

THEME: MOCKTAIL (62A: Nonalcoholic mixed drink ... or a hint to this synonyms found at the ends of 16-, 24-, 37- and 51-Across) — last words (or "tails") of theme answers are synonyms for "mock":

"Mock" "tail"  answers:

• PRIME RIB (16A: Quality beef cut)
• MOVE THE NEEDLE (24A: Have a noticeable impact, so to speak)
• WHIZ KID (37A: Young phenom)
• TAKEN FOR A RIDE (51A: Bamboozled)

Word of the Day: KEIRA Knightley (53D: Actress Knightley) —

Keira Christina Righton OBE (/ˈkɪərə ˈnaɪtli/;  née Knightley, born 26 March 1985) is an English actress. Known for her work in both independent films and blockbusters, particularly period dramas, she has received several accolades, including nominations for two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2018, she was appointed an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to drama and charity. [...] For her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in the period romance Pride & Prejudice (2005), Knightley was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She starred in a number of more period pieces, playing a complex love interest in Atonement (2007), tastemaker Georgiana Cavendish in The Duchess (2008), and the titular socialite in Anna Karenina (2012). She forayed into contemporary dramas, appearing as an aspiring musician in Begin Again (2013) and a medical student in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). Knightley returned to historical films playing Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game (2014), earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and starred as the eponymous writer in Colette (2018). (wikipedia)

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Did you know TAGALONGS and THIN MINTS are both Girl Scout cookies and both 9 letters and both start with "T"! True story! (Briefly tragic story, for me, but only briefly). It was funny putting the revealer together—well, what turned out to be the revealer (I wasn't so sure if that's what it was when I was trying to piece it together). I solved Downs-only, and really wanted that word to be MOCKTAIL based on what I had in place: the "M" the "T" the "I" and "L" ... and probably the "K" but you never can tell with KEA/LOA—the eponymous kealoa*. So I wrote in MOCKTAIL but because I'd guessed IAMS at 57A (the clue for which I was not allowed to look at), I ended up with abutting "A"s in 33D: Longest keys on keyboards, which obviously had to be wrong, but instead of taking out the "A" in IAMS I took out most *all* of MOCKTAIL. Sigh. I kept thinking about a piano keyboard, and thought "well ... all the white keys are the same length so ... what do you call those?" And there's only *one* space bar on a computer keyboard, so the clue just wasn't registering correctly with me. Annnnnyway, once it was all sorted out and the puzzle was over, I looked at MOCKTAIL, then looked at the longer Across answers, saw the whole "mock" "tail" thing going on, and thought "huh, OK, yeah, that works." Those words *do* mean "mock" and they *do* come at the "tail" end of their respective answers, so you can't say that the theme isn't as advertised. It does the thing it says it does. Hard to be mad at a puzzle like that.

The grid feels very black square-heavy and (consequently) super-choppy through the NW and SE. There are double cheater squares (?!) (above the "B" in RIB and below the "M" in MOCK). "Cheater squares" are black squares that don't add to the word count—they just make the grid easier to fill. Those double cheaters make the grid look weird and kind of amateurish. This is what happens when you arrange your themers a certain way, namely this way, namely with the "B" in PRIMERIB and the "H" in MOVETHENEEDLE in the same column, such that they pretty much have to be part of the same answer. You kinda gotta put black squares over that "B" 'cause good luck finding anything that will fit a -B-H or a --B-H pattern. Honestly, simply making MOVETHENEEDLE and TAKENFORARIDE switch places wouldn't have helped much, since you'd've been in the same position, just with "F" instead of "H"—no -B-F or --B-F answers either (unless you want to go with DAB OF, which hopefully you do not). Nah, you gotta really rethink the grid structure *or* just do what they did here and go with the double cheaters. No one but me is gonna care, so why not? Make it easy on yourself. 

Not being able to get SPACEBARS was definitely the biggest hang-up I had on the Downs-only front, though I couldn't get SCENTED either (impossible to know what the first letter was since MUS- at 42A could've ended in so many things). But the most surprising hang-up in retrospect was NORI (26D: "Me neither"), which I had as NOPE, and then NOT I. This meant I kept doubting OZS, which seemed the only plausible answer for 31D: Parts of lbs., but I just couldn't square it with the crosses, since I kept getting either OEP or OET depending on which (wrong) answer I went with. Finally NORI occurred to me. Really would've appreciated a sushi clue there, for differentiation and clarity purposes. But whatever, I got there, eventually. Had TAKES FOR A RIDE before TAKEN etc. but had enough foresight to see that it might be a different verb tense. And that was that. The fill feels a little subpar today, but the theme works fine, and that's all I really ask of these early-week puzzles—a theme that works and fill somewhere north of garbage. Mission accomplished. Gotta run. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

**kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

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