Trumpet flourish / TUE 6-11-24 / Pounded taro dish / Title role for Lee Marvin in a 1962 western / Meteorological description in a Beatles song / Poet Frank who led the 1950s-'60s "New York School" / Cutting onomatopoeia / Nickname for Oliver Cromwell / Unfortunate neighbor of Mount Vesuvius

Constructor: Chloe Revery

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)

THEME: FIRST LADY (58A: Title for Jackie or Jill, and a hint to the answers to the starred clues) — "first" words of theme answers can all follow the word "LADY":

Theme answers:

• GAGA ABOUT (17A: *Crazy for)
• LIBERTY VALANCE (23A: *Title role for Lee Marvin in a 1962 western)
• LUCK OUT (36A: *Get seriously fortunate)
• MARMALADE SKIES (48A: *Meteorological description in a Beatles song)

Word of the Day: Frank O'HARA (16A: Poet Frank who led the 1950s-'60s "New York School") —

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. (wikipedia)

• • •

You know that feeling when you're humming along, just loving a puzzle, and then someone goes and dumps a bucket of TUCKET all over it? No? Well, neither had I, before today. What a tragedy. Gorgeous to gruesome in no time flat. When you're out of luck(et), and feel like "f*ck it!," bring in the TUCKET. The TUCKET (as it will now be known, with the definite article out front) has not been seen or heard from in over three decades. It was believed extinct. Or perhaps mythical—who even remembers 1992? But today, it returns from its decades-long hibernation / mystical journey and slimes its grim way right across my MARMALADE SKIES. "With tangerine trees, and [record scratch] TUCKET Surprise!" I cannot say enough about the monstrosity that is TUCKET. I want to put it in a bucket and chuck it. If this seems like an outsized reaction, well, first of all, hi, have we met? And second of all, I refer you to the opening words of this paragraph—I thought this puzzle was (otherwise) fantastic. The quality gap between TUCKET and the rest of this puzzle is a gulf, a chasm, it cannot be measured, you cannot see the other side of the canyon from TUCKET. I mean, I didn't *know* BANTU (as clued) (22D: ___ knots (hairstyle)), but at least I recognize the word (it's an African people / language group), and anyway, hairstyles are not in my purview—if you tell me something is a hairdo, I believe you, because my own personal hair style is NIL. But TUCKET ... TUCKET isn't just something I didn't know. It's something that should not, and possibly does not, exist. Is it real? Am I typing or still in a crossword nightmare. It *is* the 40th anniversary of Nightmare on ELM ST, maybe I'm in the middle of one of those situations, still asleep and being chased by Griddy Krueger, aka The TUCKET. Whether I'm awake or asleep, TUCKET remains very bad (please congratulate me on getting through this paragraph without using "suck it").

But before TUCKET, wow, what a beauty. I smiled when I threw down MCGRIDDLE and then *beamed* when MCGRIDDLE led to LIBERTY VALANCE! OK, yes, I did spell it LIBERTY VALENCE at first, as if it were a chemical or psychological phenomenon, but no matter. What a great movie: Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Lee Marvin and Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode in the same damn western?! That's a lot of western! Before The Man Who Shot LIBERTY VALANCE, you couldn't get that much iconic western manliness on the screen at one time—science had not yet figured it out. But then John Ford was like "TUCKET! I want Wayne *and* Stewart! I'm putting them both in my movie, and a handful of other tough guys to boot, who cares if I literally set the atmosphere on fire!?" And then time passed and here we are, enjoying LIBERTY VALANCE with an APEROL chaser! (18D; Red alcohol in a spritz). Recommendation for APEROL lovers out there: ditch the spritz and try a Naked & Famous. I learned about this (apparently already famous) drink from my new favorite podcast, "Cocktail College."  It's a sour with equal parts (3/4 oz.) APEROL, lime juice, yellow chartreuse and mezcal, shaken, up (in a coupe). Simple and delicious. 

So this puzzle hits me with a sweet breakfast treat and then an iconic western and a colorful cocktail ingredient and *then* hits me with my favorite modern poet!? (Frank "Don't Confuse Me With John" O'HARA!). I was all in. This is why The TUCKET was so tragic, but let's not revisit that. Back to the theme—it's very simple, very straightforward, nothing terribly tricky about it. I had the "Lady" bit figured out after the first two themers, but did not know what the revealer was going to be, exactly. In retrospect, FIRST LADY seems obvious. This is such a good example of how your theme does not have to be overly complicated. If the concept is tight enough, and especially if the answers are colorful enough, then you can do wonders by focusing on good old-fashioned craftsmanship. Speaking of old-fashioned, the other drink I just learned about that I still need to try is the Oaxacan Old Fashioned. No APEROL in there, but it still has the MEZCAL (only three crossword appearances? didn't debut til 2019!?) as well as crossword favorite AGAVE (nectar). Anyway, on the next hot weekend, I'm giving it a shot. 

The puzzle played harder than usual because, well, TUCKET, but also BANTU took me a bit, and then I couldn't get either POMPEII (41D: Unfortunate neighbor of Mount Vesuvius) or RATTLE (46D: Maraca, e.g.) from their initial letters and ended up having to come back for that SW corner. First I just blanked on the city near Vesuvius, and then I couldn't spell it. Two "I"s!! I was like "well POMPEI won't fit and neither will ... POMPEIAN (!?!?)" so I dunno, man." As for RATTLE ... I mean, true, but so basic I never would've thought of it. Also I confess I get "maraca" and "marimba" confused, still (the latter is also Latin American, and also a percussion instrument, but you play it with mallets (something like a xylophone)). The puzzle wasn't *hard*, just harder than the usual Tuesday, for me. Also, much (much) prettier than the usual Tuesday. That is, until ... but enough about that. Let's not revisit that. Let's listen to some Gary Puckett instead.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. I recently started my vintage paperback blog back up again. Most of you don’t care, but some of you do 😉 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]