Fruit-resembling mollusk / MON 8-31-26 / Ham on an antipasto platter / Umbrella-shaped sea creature / Redding with two posthumous Grammys / Ski in zigzags / Attire for the Sugar Plum Fairy

Constructor: Christopher Youngs

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: "SPREAD THE WORD!" (51A: "Tell everyone!" ... or what to do with the starts of 20-, 31- and 44-Across) — first parts of theme answers are things that you "spread" (on bread)

Theme answers:

• BUTTERFINGERS (20A: One who regularly drops things)
• JELLYFISH (31A: Umbrella-shaped sea creature)
• HONEYMOON (44A: Newlyweds' getaway)

Word of the Day: MARSHA P. Johnson (28D: ___ P. Johnson (gay rights activist)) —

Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 3, 1992) was an American LGBTQ activist, sex worker and performer. Sometimes known as the "Saint of Christopher Street", she is considered an important figure in the LGBTQ and transgender rights movements due to her involvement in the Stonewall riots, her work with Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and her advocacy for people with AIDS.

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Johnson wore women's clothing for the first time when she was five years old. After graduating from high school, she moved to Manhattan, where she regularly spent time on 42nd Street in Times Square, working at the local Childs Restaurants and supplementing her income through begging and sex work. Often going out in partial drag, she became well known for her vibrant accessories. She participated in the Stonewall riots in 1969, though her exact role is debated, and afterward, she was active in the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In 1970, she participated in the Weinstein Hall occupation and helped found STAR, which provided food and shelter for transgender youth through STAR House, a four-bedroom rental home in the East Village.

After STAR's dissolution in 1973, Johnson began performing with various theatrical troupes around Manhattan, including the Angels of Light and the Hot Peaches. After the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in New York in 1980, she cared for her friends who were dying of AIDS and engaged in AIDS-related activism. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1992, with her body being found floating in the Hudson River on July 6. While police initially ruled her death a suicide, many speculate that she was either murdered, chased into the water, or fell in accidentally. She was 46. (wikipedia)

• • •

Today (Sunday evening, as I'm writing this) is something called "Porchfest" in Binghamton. Musicians of various kinds play from the front porches of people's homes on the West Side, with music starting some time around midday and going until ... well, I can hear a concert going on right now, just over the back from where I live, so ... still going on. It's a fun end-of-summer community event. Not fun for me, exactly, but people seem to like it, and it's very family-friendly, and the weather is nice for walking around and hearing music outside, so ... that's nice. For them. For me, I'm just grateful I am on the far outskirts of it all, so the music has not been very noticeable most of the day and is not likely to keep me up. Right now, however, it's very very audible, and I have a hard time writing in a noisy environment ... or, I have a hard time enjoying writing in a noisy environment. I just endured somebody's idea of "Johnny B. Good," so maybe you sympathize. Maybe not. Anyway, I'm going to keep this relatively short. I really am happy that my community is (largely) happy. Not everything is for me, personally, and That's OK. 

Luckily, this puzzle was for me. "For me" in the sense that I pretty much crushed my Downs-only solve, and also "for me" in the sense that I liked the revealer (once I finished and read the clue for it—before that, I was like "shouldn't it be SPREADS THE WORD? And then you mentally repunctuate it to SPREAD'S THE WORD ... because the word ... at the front of the answer ... is a spread?" But I like the way the revealer clue does it. What you do to those things, those words, is spread them. SPREAD THE WORD! Works fine. The fill today isn't exactly scintillating, but it isn't rotten either. You get a BANANA SLUG (30D: Fruit-resembling mollusk) to go with your JELLYFISH (which is nice if you are into animals named after foods...), and you get PROSCIUTTO to go on your SAMMIE. The boatload of 3-4-5s keep things from getting too interesting, but considering said boatload, it's impressive that the fill isn't drearier. ALIA is the only thing that seemed to fall in the "Regrettable" category. Everything else: solid. Fine.

I had one real sticking point today—a three-letter word that somehow ended up having a lot of deleterious downstream effects. See, if you tell me that a cooking vessel is "Deep-dish," I'm going to assume it's a POT, not a PAN (40D: Deep-dish vessel). A PAN!?!? I use one all the time to sauté vegetables, fry eggs, etc., and it's really quite shallow. I realize PANs can be deep, but if you give me POT and you give me PAN and you ask me which one do I most associate with deepness, it's not really a contest. POT wins. So I wrote in POT. This gave me ROD in the cross, which seemed quite plausible, but that -OOT ending ... that was a problem. I balked at SAMMIE because that gave me a -MOOT ending on that last themer, and I could not think of a plausible phrase ending "MOOT." "POINT MOOT!" I imagined someone saying. Didn't sound right. I then blanked on MARSHA and got a little worried. But I got ALE and TOY easily (38D: Ginger ___ / 39D: Cup-and-ball or yo-yo), and I knew the themers started with foods, so ---EY-OOT suddenly became HONEYMOON. Goodbye POT, hello PAN. Extremely disappointing to find out POT was wrong, since it's so much better and full of inherent deepness than a PAN, but whatever, I got through, then I got MARSHA, and I finished on AVALON, just like King Arthur. [lol I only realized just now, during formatting/editing, that "Deep-dish" was supposed to evoke pizza, not just "vessel" depth ... I guess I could rewrite this paragraph and hide the evidence of my idiocy, but where's the fun in that?]

Bullets:

• 28A: Role for Selena Gomez on "Only Murders in the Building" (MABEL) — MABEL crossing MARSHA would have "Natick" written all over it if that "M" weren't completely inferable. I had heard of MARSHA but forgot, and I probably knew the Selena Gomez character at some point but, again, forgot. Crossing two non-universally-known proper nouns—dicey! But there's no way that square can be anything but an "M," so ... judges say: fair! No Natick!
• 50D: Part of an Instagram post (PHOTO) — I check Instagram nearly every day and so was weirdly baffled that I couldn't immediately come up with an answer here. I think my problem was that every post I see on Insta is a video, not a photo. Well, 95% of them are videos, at any rate. So what should've been obvious ... wasn't. Not immediately, anyway.
• 52D: Skin opening (PORE) — if you wanted this to be FORE, you know, that kinda makes sense. Not a likely way for a FORE- clue to go, but with -ORE firmly in place, I can see how you might be tempted. 
• 37A: Took shots first, then paid for them later (RAN A TAB) — not my favorite answer—big ATE A SANDWICH energy—but I like the clue, and since the answer actually *crosses* a sandwich (or SAMMIE), I'm gonna assume the answer is actually winking at me, which I find endearing. 

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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