Cute little mishap / TUE 6-13-23 / Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry / Classic theater name

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden and Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for a Tuesday)

THEME: "READY TO GO?" (34A: "Got everything before we leave?" ... with a checklist seen in the circled letters) — theme answers contain the "checklist," which checklist includes ID, CASH, KEYS, and PHONE:

Theme answers:

• TAXI DRIVER (17A: One hailed on city streets)
• VOLCANIC ASH (23A: Output from an eruption)
• WHISKEY SOUR (49A: Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry)
• KEEP HONEST (57A: Hold to a moral code)

Word of the Day: ELSTON Howard (27A: Yankee great ___ Howard) —

Elston Gene Howard (February 23, 1929 – December 14, 1980) was an American professional baseball player who was a catcher and a left fielder. During a 14-year baseball career, he played in the Negro leagues and Major League Baseball from 1948 through 1968, primarily for the New York Yankees. A 12-time All-Star, he also played for the Kansas City Monarchs and the Boston Red Sox. Howard served on the Yankees' coaching staff from 1969 to 1979.

In 1955, he was the first African American player on the Yankees roster; this was eight years after Jackie Robinson had broken MLB's color barrier in 1947. Howard was named the American League's Most Valuable Player for the 1963 pennant winners after finishing third in the league in slugging average and fifth in home runs, becoming the first black player in AL history to win the honor. He won Gold Glove Awards in 1963 and 1964, in the latter season setting AL records for putouts and total chances in a season. His lifetime fielding percentage of .993 as a catcher was a major league record from 1967 to 1973, and he retired among the AL career leaders in putouts (7th, 6,447) and total chances (9th, 6,977). (wikipedia)

• • •

PKW. That was the original checklist, the original mnemonic, which I think I got from "Broad City" like a decade ago. The most useful thing I ever learned from a television comedy, by a mile. I say it to myself, mentally and/or out loud, virtually every time I leave the house. My wife and I both do this. We sometimes say it to each other, with a question mark on the end. "PKW?" It's like "You got everything?" And then we literally, ritualistically touch every item on the list to make sure we got it. The "W" here stands for wallet—we both carry wallets, though sometimes I think my wife's wallet goes inside a little purse, depending on what we're doing. Anyway, the point is, it's a very, very useful mnemonic. PKW! P.K. Dubs! It's short and sweet and it works. I've tried to add letters at times, but they don't really stick. "Mask" was something I tacked on to the end during the first COVID years, but "PKWM" just didn't want to happen. I sometimes need to remember "glasses" (sun- or regular, depending on which I currently have on) or "headphones" (if I'm going to be walking for any distance, which is often). But the core house-leaving mnemonic is unchanging: PKW. The holy trinity. This will perhaps partly explain why the concept of this puzzle is appealing to me, but the execution feels slightly off the mark. Now, I don't expect everyone to share my particular checklist/mnemonic. I just need to believe in the checklist itself, and I don't really believe in this one. I specifically don't believe CASH, and I'm iffy on I.D. I like to have CASH on me sometimes, but it's not essential—nowhere near as essential as PHONE and KEYS, and anyway, WALLET takes care of it. WALLET also takes care of I.D. (which I would never say—"I.D." is what a bar might ask for, but it's not a term I'd use when referring to my drivers license). Is IDCASHKEYSPHONE a common mnemonic? ICKP? ICK-P? It's a plausible checklist, for sure, but the items on the checklist don't feel tight. The first two feel less on-the-money than the second two. I don't know why the checklisted items are embedded in longer answers. Is something conceptual happening there? Maybe the answers "have" those things the way you need to "have" those things when you leave the house? OK. As a revealer, "READY TO GO?" felt less-than-snappy when I first wrote it in, but the more I say it out loud to myself, the better it sounds. 

The puzzle as a whole was way, Way harder than most Tuesdays for me. Well, I was way slower, anyway, for sure. Those corners are massive, and a lot of the longer Downs needed many crosses before they became clear. INAHOLE TALKSUP SAWPAST and then *all* the Downs in the SE: ANTBEAR (bear!?) MOVESIT STARTLE. All required work before I could parse them. I feel doomed never to remember ELSTON. I've seen his name a bunch in puzzles, and yet it won't stick. I had EASTON there at first today. The preponderance of two-letter words in today's puzzle made things tough. SET AT was SET TO at first (31A: Programmed to, as a thermostat) (yes, I see that "TO" was in the clue ... now). MOVES IT. TALKS UP. GEAR TO, yeesh, that one was brutal somehow (37D: Make specifically for). MAY NOT, also bizarrely hard for me to parse (48A: Is forbidden to). I had VOLCANO LAVA before VOLCANIC ASH. I couldn't make heads or tails of ITEM as the answer to 29A: Meeting point? until after I was done with the puzzle (I thought maybe it was referring to two people who, having ... met? ...  became a romantic ITEM, but it's the ITEM on any "meeting's" agenda. Seems obvious ... now. 

Would never spell OOPSY that way (or at all) (51D: Cute little mishap). Kept trying to make OWIE stretch to five letters somehow. We get double Spanish gender confusion at the bottom of the grid, in practically adjacent answers, with ESA and MUCHOS (not ESO or MUCHAS, both of which were reasonable answers). The fill felt a little on the weak side overall today, despite those reasonably solid longer Downs in the corners. APOLO SETAT ARIE ATIT KBS SITU ESA ERTE, stuff like this made the grid feel stuffy / clunky at times. But overall it's probably got more life than most Tuesdays. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Clue on CITY BUS wasn't great (24D: Subway alternative), since the alternative to the subway is the bus, just the bus, that's it. If you're going to clue it that way, it's bus. You're clearly, obviously in the "city," since that's the only place you'd find a subway. ("Subway" had me looking for a sandwich shop). Also you probably should take "city" out of that TAXI DRIVER clue (17A: One hailed on city streets) (why in the world didn't that clue reference the movie???)

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