British tennis champ who invented the sweatband / SUN 2-14-21 / Debussy prelude inspired by a water sprite / Small woodland songbird / Mango Madness and Go Bananas for two

Constructor: Lisa Bunker

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

Is it ... art?

THEME:"Sealed With a Kiss"— eight rebus squares contain RED[some fourth letter], where the fourth letters spell out RUBY LIPS ... I can't tell if they are supposed to be a visual representation of lips or what, but ... I did a drawing anyway, just in case (above). Anyway, Red "R," Red "U," Red "B," etc.:

Theme answers:

• SNA[RE DR]UM / REDRAFTS
• C[REDU]LOUS / POWERED UP
• CHARTE[RED B]US / SACRED BOOK
• HUND[RED Y]ARD / SCAREDY CAT
• JA[RED L]ETO / ASSUREDLY
• EXTRA C[REDI]T / INGREDIENTS
• F[RED P]ERRY / ORDERED PAIR
• EA[RED S]EAL / MAÎTRE D'S

Word of the Day: "ONDINE" (51D: Debussy prelude inspired by a water sprite) —

Undines /ˈʌndiːn, ʌnˈdiːn/ (or ondines) are a category of elemental beings associated with water, first named in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus. Similar creatures are found in classical literature, particularly Ovid's Metamorphoses. Later writers developed the undine into a water nymph in its own right, and it continues to live in modern literature and art through such adaptations as Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and the Undine of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.

Undines are almost invariably depicted as being female, and are usually found in forest pools and waterfalls. The group contains many species, including nereides, limnads, naiades and mermaids. Although resembling humans in form, they lack a human soul, so to achieve mortality they must acquire one by marrying a human. Such a union is not without risk for the man, because if he is unfaithful, then he is fated to die. // 

French composer Claude Debussy included a piece called "Ondine" in his collection of piano preludes written in 1913 (Preludes, Book 2, No. 8). (wikipedia)

I mostly enjoyed solving this one, and was really looking forward to spelling out the RED letters at the end to see what my Valentine's Day message was going to be. I wrote it out and it spelled RUBY LIPS. Title is "Sealed With a Kiss," so that tracks, but I'm incredibly distracted by the fact that those aren't lips. I mean, they don't make lip shapes. Unless half of your face has fallen or you're on your side or falling through the air or something. I can't make them into plausible lip shapes. So all I can think is that ... I'm not supposed to. That it's not part of the gag. But *how* can it not be part of the theme? There are two sets of four, just as there are two lips, and they are fairly begging to be connected with a red pen (as I have done above). So it's like I'm being asked to see lips, but then they aren't there, or they are these bizarre misshapen lips. What's weirder—it doesn't seem like it would've been that hard to arrange the squares in the grid so that they *do* make plausible lip shapes. An arc up top, an arc below, voìla! I am guessing that it was not, in fact, easy to do that in practice, as you'd end up with rebus squares very close to one another—too close to pull it off and keep the grid from being a wreck. So instead you've got these rebus squares way the hell and gone out there in the NW and SE corners, where they are easier to handle, fill-wise, but where they make the whole lip representation into a mess or a farce or ... something. It's a shame that this one didn't land. It's a great idea, with a great set-up, and the theme answers themselves (the ones containing the rebus squares) are quite solid and interesting. But I ended up with a pair of lips that looked nothing like lips. Or, rather, that looked *something* like lips, but not enough like lips to be plausible lips. An angry child's drawing of lips, maybe. Anyway, it's weird, and given the promising concept, disappointing.