Suddenly go silent, in modern dating lingo / THU 4-11-24 / Verb akin to "Zoom" / Slicing and dicing, say / Whales and alligators might be seen on them / French translation of the Spanish "calle"

Constructor: Dan Caprera

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: SECRET / PASSAGES (44A: With 46-Across, some areas in Clue ... or a hint to the first, fourth, twelfth and fifteenth rows of this puzzle) — the letters in "PASSAGES" appear (secretly!) in black squares, in the indicated rows:

Theme answers:

• FOOD PREPARATION (1A: Slicing and dicing, say)
• COURTSIDE SEATS (20A: Pricey basketball tickets)
• MAN-EATING SHARK (57A: "Jaws" menace)
• PRIME REAL ESTATE (70A: Valuable property)

Word of the Day: TARA VanDerveer (10D: ___ VanDerveer, coach who holds the record for the most wins in college basketball history (1,200+)) —

Tara Ann VanDerveer (born June 26, 1953) is a former American basketball coach who was the head women's basketball coach at Stanford University from 1985 until her retirement in 2024. Designated the Setsuko Ishiyama Director of Women's Basketball, VanDerveer led the Stanford Cardinal to three NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championships: in 1990, 1992 and 2021. She stepped away from the Stanford program for a year to serve as the U.S. national team head coach at the 1996 Olympic Games. VanDerveer is the 1990 Naismith National Coach of the Year and a ten-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year. She is also one of only nine NCAA Women's Basketball coaches to win over 900 games, and one of ten NCAA Division I coaches – women's or men’s – to win 1,000 games. VanDerveer was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002. On December 15, 2020, she passed Pat Summitt for most wins in women's college basketball history. On January 21, 2024, she won her 1,203rd game as a head coach, becoming the head coach with the most wins in college basketball history, women’s or men’s. (wikipedia)

• • •

Escape room puzzles. Potato Head puzzles. Lots of game-based puzzles lately. The assumption is "we all like games, right?" and I mean yes, but also no. Not necessarily. There is this assumption that solvers are going to be familiar with the rules (and shapes, and equipment) of every damn game, and the gamey insideriness of it sometimes feels like a bit of a drag. Very clubby, somehow. Also very male. Guys make these puzzles, primarily, if not exclusively—especially lately; women have made precisely 1.5 Thursday puzzles this year. But guys tend to be more fond of the "look at what I did with my grid" architectural-wonder-type puzzles in general. It would be nice to have a larger sample size for women (gender equity on the crossword byline this year continues to be pretty ... elusive?). This puzzle didn't really evoke Clue with any visual or structural specificity—the grid isn't shaped like the board, there aren't real SECRET PASSAGES taking you from one part of the grid to another (though I'm pretty sure I've seen that conceit in puzzles before). Instead, you get a very straightforward but nonetheless clever visual representation of the term SECRET PASSAGES, with the word "PASSAGES" hidden in black squares. Very nice that the grid looks like a normal grid with the black squares in place (i.e. no gibberish); the only way you know something is up is that the initial clue on each of the four relevant rows does not appear to match its answer. "How is [Slicing and dicing, say] merely FOOD?" "How is [Pricey basketball tickets] merely COURT?" I was very much helped by having those first two theme rows start with complete words that were actually part of the longer answer (i.e. "food" = "food" in the larger answer, "court" = "court" in the larger answer, while "mane" does not equal "mane" in its longer answer (MAN-EATING SHARK)). I "got" the theme by realizing that -SIDE SEATS was obviously missing from COURT. Tried to make some kind of rebus happen, and failed. Then I started in on the north, got REP, noticed FOOD*REP*... and put the whole concept together: [Slicing and dicing, say] is not FOOD but FOOD (P)REP(A)RATION. And so on. Well, the "and so on" wasn't clear immediately, but I got the revealer reasonably quickly, and then the spelling gambit became clear, and all the missing letters in all the indicated rows could be (mentally) filled right in.

All that theme drama came early. Once SECRET PASSAGES went in, I didn't really notice or even need the theme much any more. The only answers you're gonna get stuck on in this puzzle, if you don't know the theme, are those four initial Acrosses on the first, fourth, twelfth, and fifteenth rows. I didn't even see the clue on MANE, so easily did the SW corner fill itself in, though the theme did end up helping me with that last row. A good deal of excitement / interest goes out of the puzzle once you get the theme. This is not uncommon, or terribly surprising, but the grid didn't have much to offer, non-thematically, in the way of fill—just OLIVE TREES and POLO SHIRTS, really. Overall fill is about average. We get a lot more 6+-letter fill than we did yesterday, but it's all pretty plain. Hard to get excited about ENLISTED or PARENTAL or FORSAKEN. I think my favorite part of the grid, spice-wise, is the SE, with its GHOST SHARK ORGY—you do not wanna get mixed up in one of those, I tell you what.

I did not know Van Gogh painted OLIVE TREES. I know he painted CYPRESS TREES because I went to that exhibit at the Met last summer with my daughter, when my wife and I were in NYC for the Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament that we never made it to because we got called home on a bat emergency and then proceeded to have Bat Week at our house—if you think a GHOST SHARK ORGY is scary, try waking up to a bat in your house multiple nights in a row, even after you've let it fly out of the house each night; finding it flying around your bedroom even though you shut the door, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum ad astra ad nauseam. We got a bat guy who came to put these little one-way bat tunnels somewhere in our house that let the bats get out but not get back in. It was probably just the one bat. We never saw more than one. One was enough. Plenty. No more bats after the bat guy did his thing. Still, didn't sleep right for weeks. Serious short-term PTSD. Anyway, that's my Van Gogh story. 

Explainers:

• 63A: Whales and alligators might be seen on them (POLO SHIRTS) — this was easy (I had most of SHIRTS in place before I looked at the clue), but we didn't have whales when I was growing up. There was the polo guy for Ralph Lauren and then the alligator for Izod and maybe a tiger for Le Tigré (did I dream that brand up?), but whales, not a thing in '80s California. Some brand called Vineyard Vines? I notice that dudes of all ages wear polos when they want to semi-dress up (i.e. ditch the hoodie), but I haven't touched one since I was a wannabe preppy teenager. They're weirdly expensive for being so boring. Ah, look, Le Tigré! It's real!

• 6D: Draft status (ENLISTED) — I see that this is a military thing but I thought your "draft status" was like "1-A" or "4-F" or something like that. Once you are drafted, then you're ... ENLISTED? There has not been a draft in my adult lifetime. Conscription for Vietnam ended when I was three.
• 47D: Author Joe Hill, vis-à-vis Stephen King (SON) — the pen name of Joseph Hillström King, who is a successful author of horror and fantasy in his own right.
• 53D: Suddenly go silent, in modern dating lingo (GHOST) — this seems slightly weird as an intransitive verb. You GHOST ... someone. That's how I've heard it used, for the most part. Although now that I think of it, "he ghosted" could just mean "he suddenly went silent," so ... OK. Here's merriam-webster.com on this relatively recent coinage.
• 56D: Verb akin to "Zoom" (SKYPE) — the capital "Z" was the tipoff here. Do people still SKYPE? Seems so ... 2006, or something.
• 61D: Name found in "affirmation" (IRMA) — just an awful cluing trend. Give us an actual human with this name or get out. I don't *so* much mind the [Apt name for a ___] type of cluing ([Apt name for a cook?] STU! etc.), but here, there's zero connection between the name and the word it's found in. [Name found in "time"] => TIM! Is that what you want!? (Actually, that's so bad I kinda like it). Anyway, IRMA Thomas is real, so use her.   

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. forgot to mention that the west was a little thorny because I wrote in VALID / SLAY instead of ALOUD / ROCK 🙃 (40A: Not in one’s head, say / 36D: Be awesome, informally). Also, my first [Terse denial] was the truly terse NOPE rather than the comparatively verbose (not to mention quaint) “NOT I!”

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]