City east of Montpellier / FRI 9-1-23 / Indie band whose name is a two-word command / Sanskrit for "force" / Biopharmaceutical giant in the Fortune 200 / Department store eponym / Nonfruit ingredient in some healthful smoothies / Trademark difference-maker

Constructor: Robert Logan

Relative difficulty: Very easy

THEME: old-fashioned slang? — no, actually, there's none. No theme.

Word of the Day: Alice PAUL (36A: Alice ___, 20th-century women's suffrage activist) —

Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.

Paul often suffered police brutality and other physical abuse for her activism, always responding with nonviolence and courage. She was jailed under terrible conditions in 1917 for participating in a Silent Sentinels protest in front of the White House, as she had been several times during earlier efforts to secure the vote for women in England.

After 1920, Paul spent a half-century as leader of the National Woman's Party, which fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Paul and Crystal Eastman, to secure constitutional equality for women. She won a major permanent success with the inclusion of women as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (wikipedia)

• • •

Lots of whooshing around today. This grid design seems to allow for maximum whoosh. The whooshing got so extreme that there were whole long answers I never even saw the clues for. SPECIAL SAUCE? Never saw it. CALL CENTER? Never saw it. The short crosses were falling so easily, everywhere I went, that for those two answers, at some point I just looked at the grid, realized there was nothing else those answers could be, and just wrote them in. I probably had SP- and -AL SAUCE already in place when I threw that one down. I know I threw down CALL CENTER from CALL CE-. The thing about these no-looks is that they not only seem undeniable, they immediately mesh with their adjacent answers. You can tell a bad guess pretty quickly (sometimes!) by the way it clashes with its neighbors, and SPECIAL SAUCE and CALL CENTER just slid right in, obviously at home. A great and good answer, respectively, but I never had to look at the clues ... which, in the case of SPECIAL SAUCE, is probably good, because that clue is just confusing (39A: Trademark difference-maker). I guess this is referring to the generic use of the term. I always think of it as a McDonald's-specific term. I wonder if the term ever existed before "two all-beef patties SPECIAL SAUCE lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame-seed bun"? Whoa, apparently the term predates the McDonald's jingle by a good century! I guess the term is used a lot now in business-speak, and sometimes takes the form of "secret sauce." In fact, it looks like when the Big Mac first came out, McDonald's referred to the sandwich's trademark thousand island-esque goop as "secret sauce"... 

... but that all changed with the 1974 ad campaign, when the rat-a-tat ingredient list became part of the jingle.

Anyway, [Trademark difference-maker] would've thrown me if I'd looked at it too early. When I saw the clue in isolation just now, going through the clue list, I thought, "I don't remember that clue ... what was the answer? DAY?" But no, SPECIAL SAUCE. Splashy!

Some of the longer answers felt a bit ... I dunno, forced. Slightly. The oddly specific JEEP SAFARIS, the phrase "IT'S A BEAUT"—I want it to be "SHE'S A BEAUT" (which googles better), but I guess "IT'S A BEAUT" has some authority, if only from this scene from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (which is the first thing that comes up with you google ["IT'S A BEAUT"]):

["IT'S A BEAUT, CLARK! IT'S A BEAUT"]

But though a few longer answers wobbled slightly, most of the rest were great. Old-fashioned slang can be hard to take at times, but when you stack it—well, now it looks like an intentional quaintness party, and turns out I don't mind that at all. "DARN IT ALL!" over "OKIE DOKIE!"? Dadgummit (and/or dagnabbit), why not!? I would never spell OKIE or DOKIE that way, but maybe that's how they spelled 'em in Norman Rockwell times, what do I know? Even though the crossword has always (as far as I know) spelled them as "Y" words, I didn't have trouble with the alt-spelling, and I appreciated the bygone colloquial energy a lot.

Notes:

• 16A: Sanskrit for "force" (HATHA) — my longtime (Iyengar) yoga teacher, who moved away many years ago, is going to be back in town this week teaching a few special classes, and I'm going, but omg why did I start a new lower-body routine at the gym this week!? My ... well, every part of me, from knee to ass, is absolutely wrecked. Like, I have to lower myself into chairs using my arms and standing / climbing stairs / etc. is an Adventure. Luckily, they also do yoga who only stand and breathe, so I should be fine. Just not physically impressive (not that that was ever likely, but one can always dream). So, as they say, never skip leg day, but know your limits.
• 53A: Biopharmaceutical giant in the Fortune 200 (AMGEN) — woof. Just an awful five-letter flop. I have no idea what this even stands for. Apparently I've seen it twice before, but ugh, a pharma co.? Of some sort? There has gotta be a better way to do this corner. I'd tear it back to the studs to get rid of AMGEN (it was the last thing I got—an unpleasant way to end things). AMGEN is a portmanteau (!) of "Applied Molecular Genetics," the company's original name. I'm hoping that typing this out will help me remember this time the next time AMGEN (unfortunately, inevitably) shows up. But I doubt it. I've probably typed these exact words before.
• 35A: The late Mrs. Flanders on "The Simpsons" (MAUDE) — quarter-century later, I still can't believe they killed her off. With a T-shirt cannon, no less. The indignity. (The great voice actor Maggie Roswell quit in 1999 because the producers of the show were bizarrely cheap. They hired her back in 2002 because, well, she was just too important. In the interim, they killed Maude, one of the characters she had voiced).

• 21D: Nonfruit ingredients in some healthful smoothies (OATS) — had the -TS and wanted to write in PITS. Then figured that was unlikely, possibly hazardous, and then remembered that OATS are sometimes involved. Much better.
• 45D: City east of Montpellier (ARLES)— that's France, not Vermont. The Vermont capital just has the one "L." 

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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