Classic British two-seater / SAT 3-9-19 / Freeze that extends out from coastline / Goal of having no unread emails / Drink with espresso whipped cream / Pianist's finger-sliding / Some workers who stretch plastic materials / Oxymoronic skiing condition / Guys dolls composer lyricist

Constructor: Sam Trabucco

Relative difficulty: Challenging (close to 10, maybe ... I paused to take my coat off (??) and I also had to hunt down a dumb typo)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: DRAWMEN (45A: Some workers who stretch plastic materials) —

a worker who draws precut plastic materials to desired shapes in a hand or power press (m-w)

Well WHIT and TANKINI and good night! I mean Good and Night. I have rarely had a pair of mutually "confirming" wrong answers wreck me like that, right from the get-go (1D: Little bit / 17A: Modest article of swimwear with a portmanteau name). And WHIT gave me the (correct) "I" for "I DECLARE," so I was horrifically locked into wrongness up there. Even after I'd given up on that corner and gone and eventually solved the rest of the grid, even after breaking back into that corner from the outside with ALRIGHTY THEN, even after taking out WHIT, I just couldn't break through. New problem after new problem after new problem. Changed WHIT to ... DRIP. Briefly wondered if perhaps there existed an article of swimwear as ultra-modest as the PARKINI ("The Parka You Wear In The Pool!"). And even after, finally, I got what piece of swimwear they were after, I went with BIRKINI ... because I had REDID for 2D: Brought back (REDUX), which I think is actually the hardest thing in the puzzle. Just brutal. Looks verbal, is adjectival? So, yeah, first "completed" grid had BIRKINI / REDID. Yeah, I know there are no [Sorority letters] called DIS (ugh, [Sorority letters], worst worst worst, i.e. most useless, Greek letter clue type). I am kind of resentful of DILI up there, which is some Maleska-era arcane geographical stuff. Yeah yeah, it's a capital blah blah blah. It's obscure. (5D: Capital and largest city of East Timor)

The SW was also tough, but nowhere near as touch as the NW for me. I had ZERO in place and so got INBOXZERO right away (common concept to me, not sure why). But DRAWMEN, ugh, oof, jeez, other exclamations. What in the world? You really gotta know when to say "No" to your wordlist. That answer is dire. More dire than FASTICE, which sounds like a hockey or maybe a speed-skating term to me (46A: Freeze that extends out from a coastline). But back to the SW: found the names easy (KNOWLES, ELLEN, TESS), but still had to hack hack hack at the [Classic British two-seater], because even after guessing MIL (28A: Significant investment, informally), and getting that the car was an MG, I still couldn't put MIDGET together, partly because of DRAWMEN (Ugh ... ugh REDUX!), but mostly because I went with PULLED at 50A: Took in (GULLED). I was thinking [Took in] in the sense of "earned" (financially). I had one other major mistake in the NE, where the "P" from PERU made me certain the answer to 9D: Alternatives to tablets (GELCAPS) was LAPTOPS. I even overrode the "E" in VENTI to make LAPTOPS happen. Blargh. But somehow that mistake was easier to pull myself out of than the PULLED mistake and especially alllll the mistakes I made in the NW, starting with WHIT / TANKINI. Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. XMEN crossing DRAWMEN = too MEN-y MEN in one place

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