Ceremonial plates for the Eucharist / SAT 8-26-23 / Not online, to a texter / Model Boyd of London's "Swinging Sixties" era / Deceive so as to deflect / Woman with enfants / Language spoken in Middle-earth / Cast-iron cooking directive / Five-minute rock classic with an iconic organ intro

Patricia Anne Boyd (born 17 March 1944) is an English model and photographer. She was one of the leading international models during the 1960s and, with Jean Shrimpton, epitomised the British female look of the era. Boyd married George Harrison in 1966, experiencing the height of the Beatles' popularity and sharing in their embrace of Indian spirituality. She divorced Harrison in 1977 and married Harrison's friend Eric Clapton in 1979; they divorced in 1989. Boyd inspired Harrison's song "Something", and Clapton's songs "Layla", "Bell Bottom Blues" and "Wonderful Tonight".

In August 2007, Boyd published her autobiography Wonderful Today (titled Wonderful Tonight in the United States). Her photographs of Harrison and Clapton, titled Through the Eye of a Muse, have been widely exhibited. (wikipedia)

I liked this quite a bit. Those NW and SE corners are really wonderful, and everything else is at least solid. The puzzle doesn't over-rely on obscure words (only PATENS comes close) or proper nouns (though there are few nice ones). Instead it's full of familiar words and phrases, many of them fresh and colloquial and surprising. That SE corner is one of the nicest four-layer cakes I've ever seen. 10 on 10 on 10 on 10 and no misses. INITIATIVE is the weakest of the bunch, and it's not weak at all. And the four-layer cake is toothpicked into place by more solid long answers: PONTIFF, ANIMATES, GNOMISH (!), INSEAMS. And then you've got the witty decorative flourish in the icing, or the cherry on top, maybe, with that WEST clue in the far southeast (52D: Inapt locale for this answer). Don't ask me why there's ATIT on the cake, maybe it's a novelty cake depicting a STRIPTEASE, I don't know. Look, I'm not the best with cake metaphors, this puzzle surely deserves better. But I like cake and I liked this puzzle and that's what matters, I think. 

I loved the way that the NW corner opened up. I started out with a very good but also very bad guess at 1-Across, throwing down ACT ONE'S AGE for 1A: Behave in a way suitable to one's situation (ACT THE PART). I stared briefly and triumphantly at my impressive opening gambit ... only to notice that ONE'S was actually in the clue itself, so there was no way ACT ONE'S AGE could be right. Gah! So then I pulled it and did what I usually do first: work the short Downs. Very quickly I was here:

There were a couple of minor sticking points on the journey to my final destination (the eastern WEST). I had the elder relative as GRAN, not GRAM, so at 41A: First N.F.L. quarterback to pass for 50,000 yards, I wrote in the first six-letter quarterback I could think of whose name started with an "N"—Joe NAMATH. Then I had a repeat of my 1-Across experience: feeling Pret-ty good about myself for a half second before realizing "wait, that canNot be right ... that's way too many yards for NAMATH." Plus the "T" in NAMATH was where an "S" or "N" needed to be (36D: Mexico City-to-Cancún dir. => ENE), so I pulled NAMATH, changed GRAN to GRAM, considered MONTANA (wouldn't fit), and then immediately thought of MARINO. Football problem solved. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about contemporary football, but I've got '70s-'90 pretty much on lock. Once MARINO was sorted, the rest of the corner was easy. Side note: nice little Eucharistic crossing there in the SW with PATENS crossing PONTIFF. PATENS is probably the "obscurest" thing in the grid, but it's redeemed, saved, forgiven by the crossing of the Holy Father, amen. (My papal metaphors aren't any better than my cake metaphors, I realize) (Oh, and [See star?] because the PONTIFF is the "star" of the (Holy) See)