MGWCC #862

 

hello, and welcome to episode #862 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle called “Two People”. this week’s asked us to find a celebrity with a total of eight letters in their first and last names. what were the theme answers? the set was not exactly obvious, but it turned out to be famous(ish) people with two-letter first names. only the last names went into the grid, but in some cases the clue clearly indicated that the full name was wanted. here’s what i mean:

• {Best Supporting Actress winner for 1955’s “East of Eden”} turns out to be somebody i’d never heard of named VAN FLEET. i looked it up and her first name was jo; she played the mom, cathy/kate. julie harris is the actress i’m familiar with from this film, who played the crossword-friendly ABRA. i’ve never seen the film, but in the book, cathy/kate (she changes her name—although not very much—when she runs away and changes her identity) is a much more important character, whereas harris seems to have received higher billing in the film for this somewhat minor role from the book. i get the sense that the book focuses more on the parents’ generation, adam and cathy/kate, and the movie more on the kids’ generation: caleb (played by james dean), his twin aron, and their mutual love interest abra.
• {Pitcher for whom an award is named} is (cy) YOUNG.
• {He played Andy Bernard on “The Office”} is (ed) HELMS, and the character’s full name in the clue would normally mean that the actor’s full name should go into the grid by virtue of parallelism—but it doesn’t. this is a strong hint that the first names are the relevant part of the meta mechanism.
• {He led the National League in hits in 2021 and 2022} clues (bo) BICHETTE of the toronto blue jays. i assume this is just an error in the clue—bichette led the american league in hits in those years, and has never played in the NL.
• {One of Julie Bowen’s “Modern Family” co-stars} is (ty) BURRELL. again, full name of a costar in the clue, so the fact that only the surname is in the grid points strongly to the first name.
• {Children’s book author who wrote “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Sleigh!”} is (mo) WILLEMS. the pigeon books are fine, but i’m partial to the elephant and piggie series, and knuffle bunny (although the knuffle bunny free is an unexpected tearjerker).

these aren’t the six longest entries in the grid—they’re four longest, plus two more symmetrically positioned 5’s. i guess you could argue that if all the first names were included, as they sort of should have been, they’d be longer than the rest of the fill.

anyway, the next step is to try to do something with this implicit first names: JO, CY, ED, BO, TY, and MO. of course, there aren’t any two-letter entries in the grid, but there are three-letter entries starting with each of these bigrams:

• {Average (abbr.)} is the clue for the unlovely abbreviation TYP, an abbreviation i have never seen for typical. the new oxford american dictionary (my dictionary of choice) has a listing for the abbrevation “typ.” with four possibilities: typographer, typographic, typographical, and typography. as someone who has played a great deal of online bridge, i have frequently seen this TLA for “thank you, partner”.
• {Alternative to “l8r!”} CYA, texting shorthand for “see ya”.
• {Comfy shoe} MOC.
• {Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er ___”} BOI.
• {Mr. Bon Jovi} JON.
• {Tokyo, once} EDO.

the six extra letters read from top to bottom in the grid spell out PACINO, the surname of a very famous person with a two-letter first name. since two plus six is eight, our meta answer is AL PACINO.

this is a very nice puzzle, pitched at a good week 2 difficulty. there were a few places where i felt that squeezing all the theme material into only a 13×13 grid put some undue strain on the fill, but i can understand that 8-8-7-7-5-5 is not a typical set of theme answer lengths for a 15×15 grid.

that’s all i’ve got this week. how’d you all like this one?