Mythical matchmaker / THU 4-23-20 / Tapered piece of sports equipment / Mexican tequila brand familiarly / Staple of Disney live-action remakes briefly

Constructor: Yacob Yonas and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (6:00, moving very very just-woke-up slowly)

THEME: RELOCATIONS (or "RE" LOCATIONS) (53A: Changes made to the answers to 16-, 24-, 33- and 47-Across, whether interpreted as one word or two?)  — relocate the "RE" in familiar words/phrases, so that the answers appear in the grid as different (unclued) words/phrases

Theme answers:

• BAKING BREAD (16A: Acclaimed TV show concerning a science teacher-turned-drug dealer) (move the "re" in "Breaking Bad")
• IN THREE D (!?) (24A: Financially behind) (move the "re" in "in the red")
• CATERED (33A: Brought into existence) (move the "re" in "created")
• COMPARED (47A: Amigo) (move the "re" in "compadre")

Word of the Day: Mireille ENOS (59A: Emmy- and Tony-nominated actress Mireille) —

Marie Mireille Enos (/mɪəˈreɪ ˈiːnəs/; born September 22, 1975) is an American actress. Drawn to acting from a young age, she graduated in performing arts from Brigham Young University, where she was awarded the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship. Having made her acting debut in the 1994 television film Without Consent, she has since received nominations for a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Emmy Award.

Early in her career, Enos appeared variously as a guest star on such television shows as Sex and the City and The Education of Max Bickford among others. She made her feature film debut with a minor part in the 2001 romantic comedy Someone Like You, but garnered wider attention for her role as Honey in the 2005 Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Her performance in the latter earned her a nomination for Best Featured Actress at the Tony Awards. She again ventured into television roles and landed the role of twins Kathy and JoDean Marquart in the HBO drama series Big Love.

Enos' breakout role was on the AMC crime drama series The Killing; she played Sarah Linden, a Seattle-based police officer for the show's four seasons from 2011 to 2014. Her performance garnered her critical acclaim and earned her nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the Primetime Emmy Award and the Golden Globe Award. Enos starred as Karin Lane in the 2013 disaster film World War Z and Kathleen Hall in the 2014 romantic drama If I Stay; both of the films were blockbuster productions. She continued to draw praise for her work in independent films like Never Here (2017). Enos starred as the lead character in the short-lived ABC legal thriller The Catch. In 2019, she appeared in the Amazon/BBC co-production of Good Omens as Carmine "Red" Zuigiber, a war correspondent who is actually War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (wikipedia)

Happy Shakespeare's Presumed Birthday!

"Huh ... so they're simple anagrams, then." This was me while solving this puzzle, which I found mostly easy and which I mostly enjoyed, though I mostly enjoyed it as a themeless that contained some random anagrams For Some Reason. The revealer (not only the highlight of the theme, but the only thing enjoyable about the theme) eventually made sense of those anagrams, which ... on their own, are quite limp. Turns out relocating the "RE" doesn't do much for you except get you the preposterously spelled, seriously-no-one-spells-it-like-that "IN THREE D" (in case you're still looking at those letters going "what is it!?," it's "IN 3-D," like a movie). It's always slightly weird to have unclued things in the grid. It's weirder today because they are unmarked (i.e. not asterisked or anything) and short (easy to sort out BAKING BREAD because that answer looked like a themer, but I thrashed around with IN THREE D in part because it was so short-looking, I didn't think it was a themer). The theme is thin, in that only one of the involved answers is over eight letters long, and there are only four themers total. That's 34 squares involved, total (outside the revealer, obviously. Felt scant. Maybe if the same number had been involved over *three* answers, it would have felt more substantial because the answers themselves would've been more substantial overall (and thus possibly more interesting). But in the end the theme works fine, the revealer is clever, and the rest of the grid is quite entertaining. In a bizarre turn of events, the theme has not compromised the fill—rather, the fill has thrived in spite of the theme.


All my trouble came on proper nouns. Well, that and IN THREE D, as I've said. I have circled the trouble words: GILES, TILSIT, DELHI, and ENOS. I'm sure I've heard of St. GILES, but faced with just [St. ___ (district in London)] and having just the "G"—nothing. I have heard of TILSIT, but still had some trouble recalling it (and backing into it from the -SIT) (50A: Mild Swiss cheese). DELHI, LOL, yeah, I've heard of it, it's common, but I think of it as a city, and Uttar Pradesh is a state, so I was stumped (58A: Neighbor of Uttar Pradesh). Turns out DELHI is "a city and a union territory of India containing the city of New DELHI, the capital of India." The real slower-downer answer was ENOS, whom I thought I had never heard of, but I absolutely watched "The Killing," it's just been a while and I totally forgot the main actress's name. No other slow-downs for me. Really liked TAKESIGN (about to go watch some overseas baseball as soon as I post this!). LEMONY WAGNER TACTILE CLOSE ONE YE GODS! CUERVO OOPSIE ... this one had a lot of bounce, I thought. Not the flash of a good themeless, but far far more sparkle than fill tends to have in a themed puzzle. OK it's coffee / Taiwanese baseball time. See you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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