Virtual critters since 1999 / TUE 5-24-22 / Classic lollipop with a Mystery Flavor flavor / Bit of gear for a talk show host / Online retailer whose first sale was a broken laser pointer / Crunchy wasabi-coated morsel / Me day destination / Creatures in a pod / Fish that's an ambush predator / Parodist Yankovic / Mononymous king of football

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It's more like I'm looking at people sitting in the chairs rather than the chairs themselves. The shapes vaguely resemble people doing chair pose, perhaps on a YOGA MAT, or maybe at the wall, with the wall providing back support. And yet those shapes evoke chairness well enough, and you couldn't work at all if the chairs actually had legs, so the simple three-stroke suggestion of a chair is plenty. We get the idea. And all the musicals are very well known—iconic even. Very Tuesday-appropriate. The fill, on the other hand, felt a bit amped-up from your usual Tuesday fare. Those "chairs" would've put a lot of stress on the grid, and made it somewhat challenging to fill ... and yet the complete lack of traditional theme answers really opens up possibilities, and the puzzle maximizes those today, turning this into a somewhat lively themeless at the level of ordinary solving (that is, if you took the circled squares out, you'd only have to take the latter half of the MUSICAL CHAIRS clue off to have yourself a totally themeless puzzle). The result of this fill freedom is a couple of lovely longer pairs in the middle: ROOMIES / CALUMNY on the one side, WEIRD AL / ERASURE on the other. I once saw WEIRD AL open for ERASURE in 1989. Well, no, I didn't. But I *definitely* would have.

I was slower than normal today, I think. My main problem was that I just couldn't turn the corner and zip into the NE or the SW sections from the center. Teeny tiny openings meant that if I didn't get the connecting word, I got jammed, and I couldn't get the connecting word quickly either time, first, because it  seemed inscrutable to me ("What kind of a mic is an -LMIC ... a PANEL MIC? Because the host is interviewing a panel?") 

and then because the possibilities for the latter half of the answer seemed endless ("AIR ... strips? ways? lanes? What are they going for here? [time passes] OMG it's just -PORTS!? That's too obvious, how dare they!?") (41D: Sites of frequent touchdowns). 

In the case of LAPEL MIKE, wow, first, I was imagining the wrong kind of "talk show host" (think Oprah or Maury or Donahue, not Colbert). And also, all the late-night, desk-interviewing "talk show hosts" I can think of, or many of them, make a big show of putting an olde-tymey radio mike right on the desk (even if they are actually using LAPEL MIKEs). It's a perfectly good answer, LAPEL MIKE, but I could not peep it through that tiny one-square opening. The AIRPORTS snafu is totally on me. As happens sometimes, my brain just froze on the seemingly infinite selection of possibilities. I also had trouble with PELE because "Football" threw me (my brain went digging in the wrong sport) (5D: Mononymous "King of Football"), and then ORCAS, holy cow, I was so mad that the puzzle was trying to sell the idea that OKRAS were "creatures" (21A: Creatures in a pod). Lastly, for some reason SOLACE took a lot of thinking, or crossing, or whatever. My brain just gummed up a little on that one. I blame the OKRAS fiasco.

Notes:

• 32D: Condition that affects executive function, in brief (ADHD) — me, with A-H- in place: "Yes, when I have an ACHE, my executive function is impaired, I guess, good clue!"
• 19A: What good art can make you do (FEEL) — see also "bad art" and, well, really almost anything. I kept looking around for a word that was supposed to follow FEEL, like INSPIRED or QUEASY. 
• 45A: Classic lollipop with a "Mystery Flavor" flavor— when I go into my bank (yes, I still physically enter the physical bank), I have a ritual, which is Raid the DUMDUM Baskets! I'm looking for Root Beer, but I will definitely take a Mystery Flavor (flavor). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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