Not-so-conservative party? / FRI 8-22-25 / Accessory for overseas travel / Where many gather to form a line? / Camila with the hit 2022 album "Familia" / Disassemble in order to understand / Gorman "The Hill We Climb" poet / Inlay material on some guitars / Baroque stringed instrument / Its national anthem has no words

Constructor: Gia Bosko

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Camila CABELLO (8A: Camila with the hit 2022 album "Familia") —

Karla Camila Cabello Estrabao (/kəˈmiːlə kəˈbeɪoʊ/; Latin American Spanish: [ˈkaɾla kaˈmila kaˈβeʝo esˈtɾaβao]; born March 3, 1997) is an American singer and songwriter. She rose to prominence as a member of the pop girl group Fifth Harmony, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time. While in the group, Cabello established herself as a solo artist with collaborative singles "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (with Shawn Mendes) and "Bad Things" (with Machine Gun Kelly), the latter making number four on the US Billboard Hot 100. She left Fifth Harmony in late 2016.

Cabello's debut studio album, Camila (2018), peaked atop the US Billboard 200. Largely influenced by Latin music, its lead single "Havana" (featuring Young Thug) was an international chart-topper. It was the best-selling digital single of 2018, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Its follow-up, "Never Be the Same" reached the top ten in multiple countries. Cabello's second album Romance (2019) peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and spawned a second global chart-topper in "Señorita", a duet with Shawn Mendes. Cabello's third album Familia (2022), made number ten on the Billboard 200 and contained the international hit "Bam Bam" (featuring Ed Sheeran). Cabello's fourth studio album, C,XOXO, was released in 2024.

Cabello's awards include two Latin Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards, and one Billboard Music Award. In 2021, Cabello starred as the title character in the film Cinderella. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hell of a lot of short stuff in this one, which made it very easy to get toeholds all over the place. A preponderance of short stuff can really drag a grid down with dull and overfamiliar answers (for instance: CNET, ARAL, L.A. RAM—really hate a singular L.A. RAM), but today's grid effectively counterbalanced all those 3-4-5s with eleven (11!) solid-to-great marquee answers—8+-letter words that give the grid a lot of life and a nice sense of flow. You can whoosh around this grid quite easily, and it's a lot of fun to do so. Well, *I* had fun, at any rate. The fun started right out of the gate. This one reminded me of the one and only time I rode a roller coaster with a loop. It was some Aerosmith-themed ride at ... I wanna say Disney World? ... yeah, here we go: the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith at Disney's Hollywood Studios within Walt Disney World (you can't ride it any more; it's currently closed so it can be rethemed to the Muppets (scheduled opening: 2026)). Anyway, what I remember is that they shot you into that damn loop immediately (I'm being told it was actually a double-inversion element called a "sea serpent"). Initial acceleration was powerful. Here's the equivalent moment in today's puzzle:

 

Wheeeee!!!! Just three answers in and I get shot out of a cannon, clear across the grid, an explosion set off by just two letters (the -EV- in REVERSE ENGINEER) (15A: Disassemble in order to understand). At that point, I felt very confident about being able to clean up the top half of the puzzle in very short order. The short Downs up there now all had letters in them, so they didn't stand much of a chance. And sure enough, after initially fumbling a few answers up top (MAWS before ARFS (1D: Yaps), IRK before TRY (5D: Cause headaches for)), I didn't make a misstep or even hesitate again until the bottom half of the grid.  It's true, I didn't quite know Camila CABELLO's last name (CABALLO? CARBELO?), but I had a vague idea who she was and the crosses just sort of filled themselves in (8A: Camila with the hit 2022 album "Familia"). The last letter I got up top was the "B" in her name, which immediately rocketed me down through the heart of the puzzle via BINGO PARLOR (10D: Where many gather to form a line?) (nice clue—the "line" is the numbers you're trying to connect on a bingo card). Binghamton, NY (where I live) used to have a baseball team called the Bingos. Also the Bingoes. Not sure if there was a copyright dispute or what. Why you would put that "e" in there, I don't know. It looks awful—like you typo'd "Big toes." At least they had the decency to keep it off their uniforms:

[if these guys are in your parlor ...]

GAPES AT and HAS AT is too much ___ AT for me, and READ TO crossing LOG IN TO at the "TO" was even worse, but those are minor glitches, all things considered. My own glitches all involved proper nouns—from the minor glitch of CABELLO to the somewhat more serious glitch of SAMUEL CHASE. After I pieced SAMUEL CHASE together, I was embarrassed because I thought "wait, didn't I make this guy the Word of the Day just last week??!" But lol no, that was SALMON P. CHASE. This is another CHASE entirely. Too many CHASEs!

Bullets:

• 1A: Accessory for overseas travel (ADAPTOR) — in retrospect, this should've been easy, but I wanted ID ... something ("card"? "holder"?), especially after that "D" went into place.
• 20A: Like challenging kite-flying weather (GUSTY) — had the "Y" and quickly wrote in WINDY, then just as quickly unwrote it. You gotta have wind. Unwindy would be "challenging."
• 21A: Becky on "Full House" and Esther on "Sanford and Son" (AUNTS) — I took one look at "Esther" and thought of Esther ROLLE ... who was in Good Times, not Sanford and Son. Took my brain a few seconds to process the error. These first three bullet points all involve problems in the top half of the grid, which I claimed not to have ... I think they just resolved themselves so quickly that they didn't feel like actual problems.
• 6D: Peacock's display (OSTENTATION) — An OSTENTATION is the name of a group of peacocks. Is it also the name for the spectacular tail feathers??? Merriam-webster dot com has the second meaning of OSTENTATION as "an act of displaying" (archaic), so maybe when the male peacock fans his tail out all fancy-like, that's the OSTENTATION (sorry, just realized that "male peacock" is a redundancy). The word OSTENTATION appears only once in the wikipedia entry for "peafowl," and it's not even used to describe the damned bird, : "Gaius Petronius in his Satyricon also mocked the ostentation and snobbery of eating peafowl and their eggs."

• 14D: Not-so-conservative party? (ORGY) — I would vote for this party. Can't be worse than the current ruling party.
• 57A: Brothers-to-be (PLEDGES) — fraternity brothers
• 16D: Clinton and Bush, for two (ELIS) — speaking of Yale (which the puzzle is apparently required to do at last once a week), my daughter just got back last night from striking the Diane Arbus exhibit at the Armory ("striking" is the the theater term for taking down the set and making way for the next production). She heads to Yale next week to start her MFA in Technical Design and Production. 
• 50D: ___ cow (black bovine with a white belt around its middle) (OREO) — yes, yes, more clues like this! I am enjoying this OREO clue arms race we are currently in. I will accept your crosswordese if you give it to me in the form of insane trivia.

[Actual name: Belted Galloway]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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