Shoe designer Caovilla / THU 6-4-20 / Title woman of 1965 Beach Boys hit / Beginner's trumpet sound / Low-effor internet joke / Early people of Great Lakes / Early PC software / Original occupation for Rachel on Friends

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:29, first thing in the morning)

THEME: Unhappy workers — corny verb-phrase puns related to different occupations:

Theme answers:

• 17A: The unhappy drill press operator FINDS WORK BORING
• 24A: The unhappy calendar maker NEEDS A WEEK OFF
• 40A: The unhappy elevator operator ASKS FOR A RAISE
• 52A: The unhappy orthopedic surgeon WANTS MORE BREAKS

Word of the Day: RENÉ Caovilla (12D: Shoe designer Caovilla) —

Edoardo Caovilla, the father of Rene Fernando, was a student of Luigi Voltan, who had been the first to make shoes in Riviera del Brenta's. Edoardo Caovilla favored high-end fashions marrying craftsmanship with couture. Edoardo’s wife would embroider shoes by hand in a small room with four other people. The room in which they worked has been preserved in the Caovilla factory.

In 1950, Rene Caovilla went to Paris and London to study design. He returned home and began working with his father. In the early 1960s he took over the family business from his father. He met his wife, Paola, whose family was also in the footwear business at a shoe fair. Paola became responsible for public relations and the Caovilla handbag line. His concentration was on the high-end of the market with opulent evening shoes. His work is known for elegant detailing and high quality.

Beginning in the 1970s, he worked with Valentino Garavani.. In the 1980s, he began to collaborate with Christian Dior and Chanel. Working alongside Karl Lagerfeld in 2000, Caovilla decided to create jeweled shoes. On 10 September 2007, Harrods hired a live Egyptian cobra to protect the shoe counter, guarding a pair of haute couture ruby, sapphire and diamond encrusted sandals launched by Rene Caovilla.

Among the numerous celebrities that have been seen wearing Rene Caovilla shoes are Jennifer Aniston, Tyra Banks, and Heidi Klum, Kristen Stewart, and Nikki Reed. (wikipedia)

This is a Wednesday puzzle. Is it Wednesday? Seriously, is it? Days of the week are infamously hard to tell apart during this whole pandemic business. (Checks calendar) Nope, it's Thursday alright, so I don't know what happened here. The theme type and the difficulty level both scream Wednesday, but OK, let's just roll with it. These are corny puns. If you like that sort of thing, you like it, and there you are. I like that there is kind of unity to the group on a couple of levels (all of them are "unhappy," all of the answers are 3rd-person present indicative verb phrases). That second themer feels a little off, compared to the others. Drill press operators bore, elevator operators raise (people), orthopedic surgeons help fix breaks (of bones). Calendar makers ... ??? They make calendars, which happen to contain weeks??? If you took a "week off" of a calendar, it would make no sense. This is not a paradigmatic activity of a calendar maker, although ... I wouldn't know exactly what a calendar maker does because ... what kind of job is that? I recognize the other jobs as jobs (although elevator operators today exist almost exclusively in movies from the 1930s). Calendar maker? Really? Both the job itself and the phrase associated with it feel ... well, weak (rimshot!).


There were lots of little sticky parts to this puzzle, all the stickiness due to cluing and none of stickiness very sticky. I had the hardest time with TREAD (5A: Tank part). I had -READ and wasn't sure. I kept picturing the turret. Is the TREAD the part on the ground? Is it just called a TREAD? If you said a [Car part] was TREAD, I would be a little mad at that, for sure, though technically you would be right in that a car needs tires and tires have treads. I am not a tank part specialist. I had INIMICAL (??) before INDECENT (4D: Not appropriate) and had some difficulty coming up with DEEPENS (20A: Increases in intensity). DABBLE AT before DABBLE IN slowed me somewhat (9D: Casually try). No idea about the shoe designer guy, but crosses took care of him pretty easily. Same with FTLEE (28D: One side of New York/New Jersey's G.W. Bridge), although at least I've heard of FTLEE and seen it in puzzles (which meant I could get it from FTL--). I don't think of RAW BAR as a "server," so that was weird (43D: Seafood server). [Graze] was a tough clue for SKIM (at least for me). And despite my daily non-sleeping household activity being roughly 75% KITTEN-related, I had zero idea what [Cute calendar subject] was getting at. That's a pretty tenuous connection, there. I object to all calendar-related content in this puzzle. The rest was mostly tolerable.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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