Title paratrooper in a 1998 war film / FRI 6-9-23 / Animals that share the same birthday January 1 / Baby at my breast in Shakespearean tragedy / Shoe brand with an iconic checkerboard design / Common Jesuit school name

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: RAUL Esparza (50A: Actor Esparza with four Tony nominations) —

Raúl Eduardo Esparza (born October 24, 1970) is a Cuban-American stage, screen, and voice actor, as well as singer. Considered one of Broadway's leading men since the 2000s, he is best known for his Tony Award-nominated performance as Bobby in the 2006 Broadway revival of Company and for his television role as New York Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Rafael Barba in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where he had a recurring role in Season 14 and was promoted to a series regular in Seasons 15 to 19. [...] Esparza has been nominated in all Tony categories for which an actor is eligible. He is widely regarded for his versatility on stage, having performed musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Boy George, the Sherman Brothers and in plays by Mamet, Pinter, William Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, and more. // His film work includes Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty and Wes Craven's My Soul to Take, and his television credits include roles on The Path, Medium, Hannibal and Pushing Daisies. He narrated the audiobook for Stephen King's Under the Dome as well as several others, and he sings in concerts across the country. (wikipedia)

This is pretty standard fare from Robyn Weintraub, which is to say, I really enjoyed it. It's a bit on the tame side for her, more solid than sizzling, but this is what happens when you set the bar so high—expectations go high too. The grid abounds in fresh longer answers, though only a couple have that chatty colloquial snap that really gives life to a puzzle—that is, the wonderful crossing of "TELL ME ABOUT IT!" and "THAT'S A FIRST." There's something kind of plain about most of the rest of the grid. GREENPEACE over RACEHORSES, OVERSTATED over FIESTA BOWL ... these are fine, but don't exactly make you sit up and say "Hell-o!" And yet the grid is still extremely smooth and clean, and I'd take it over 90% of other Friday grids any day. This was a fast solve for me, but my whoosh was slightly inhibited by longer answers where one or the other halves of them were hard to make out. So I'd drop "THAT'S..." and not know what followed. Or I'd get "-OUT IT" and think "well, 'NO DOUBT ABOUT IT' doesn't fit, so ... I dunno!" This isn't a complaint about the puzzle, by any means—in fact, those two answers I struggled with were, as I say, the best answers in the grid, so the struggle was very much worth it. I just never really got flying, and for the most part, the longer answers never really provided a roller-coaster thrill. Well, scratch that, I'm nerdy enough to have gotten something close to a thrill out of SERIAL COMMA (6D: Much-debated grammar topic). The NYT style guide is ANTI-. I tend to be pro-, but writing lots and lots in very short amounts of time has probably made me wildly inconsistent in practice. I just know there are times when not having a serial comma can make the exact nature of the terms in your list confusing. This may be my favorite real-life example of such confusion—from a newspaper account of a documentary about Merle Haggard: