Long-running hip-hop magazine, with "The" / TUE 11-14-23 / George or Marty of "Back to the Future" / Flowers prominently used in Indian weddings / Alcohol withdrawal symptoms in brief

Constructor: Matthew Linzer

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: MAKE A WISH (17A: What to do when you see ... [see 23-, 37-, 39-, 48- and 60-Across] — things you make a wish on:

Theme answers:

• SHOOTING STAR (23A: ... this streaker in the night)
• EYELASH (37A: ... this stray bit on your face)
• LADYBUG (39A:  ... this insect crawling by)
• ELEVEN ELEVEN (i.e. 11:11) (48A: ... this on a clock)
• DANDELION (60A: ... this just before you blow on the seeds)

Word of the Day: CHOP SUEY (10D: Chinese-American dish) —

Chop suey (/ˈtʃɒpˈsuːi/) is a dish in American Chinese cuisine and other forms of overseas Chinese cuisine, consisting of meat (usually chicken, pork, beef, shrimp or fish) and eggs, cooked quickly with vegetables such as bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery and bound in a starch-thickened sauce. It is typically served with rice but can become the Chinese-American form of chow mein with the substitution of stir-fried noodles for rice.

Chop suey has become a prominent part of American Chinese cuisine, British Chinese cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Canadian Chinese cuisine, German Chinese cuisine, Indian Chinese cuisine, and Polynesian cuisine. In Chinese Indonesian cuisine/Dutch Chinese Indonesian cuisine it is known as cap cai (tjap tjoi) (雜菜, "mixed vegetables") and mainly consists of vegetables.

This reminded me a bit of the SMASH HIT puzzle from last week, in that the theme feels upside-down and backwards. That is, we get the revealer first, and then everything thereafter is kind of anticlimactic. Yes, you wish upon this, you wish upon that, shrug. The revealer comes first, and it's got all these ugly cross-reference indications in it, and then you just get a list of "things you might wish on." I get that the idea is to tell a story, or multiple stories—hence the elliptical cluing, with each theme clue being a supposed continuation of the "revealer" clue ("What to do when you see..."). I appreciate the effort to make the puzzle unfold in a semi-unconventional way, but the revealer-first structure here just deadens the puzzle, somehow. I mean, this theme was never going to be anything more than a list, but we don't even get the tiny aha of finding out how all the answers tie together at the end. We get the tiny aha up front, and then we get to discover the things on the list, but somehow the aha is dampened and the pleasure of the solve weakened. I think the narrative structure of the theme has something to do with the fact that you have to force the answers to conform—that is, they need contexts in order to make the "wishing" part make sense. You don't wish upon a dandelion, you wish *before* blowing a dandelion to bits; you don't wish upon an eyelash, you wish upon an eyelash that you have (or someone else has) removed from your face; etc. So perhaps a straightforward revealer wouldn't quite have done the trick. Still, the theme here unfolded in a rather boring, workmanlike way, and the "..." conceit never quite works in a crossword, where soooooo many clues and answers intervene between theme elements. Plus, the theme clue writing leaves something to be desired. There's something clunky and inelegant about it. For instance, "... this streaker in the night" makes it sound like you're wishing on someone running naked through your backyard just before bedtime, and "... this stray bit on your face" makes it sound like you are a really sloppy eater. "Stray bit"??? Bit of what? Such an ugly way to refer to an EYELASH. The whole thing never really comes together, on any level, except at the level of mere list. If this puzzle had come out on ELEVEN ELEVEN, I would've appreciated the wink, and would've liked it a little more, probably.
I had MISTAKE (obviously, fittingly) before MISSTEP (7D: Blunder), but I think that's about it for ... yeah, mistakes. Really appreciated seeing The SOURCE today, as clued (33A: Long-running hip-hop magazine, with "The"). A really important magazine, though I expect it will be new to a significant section of the solving population, and might've caused things to play a little slower than usual today. In honor of The SOURCE, here's a different "HEY (not 'Hi') Y'ALL!" for y'all.