Trumpet flourish / TUE 6-11-24 / Pounded taro dish / Title role for Lee Marvin in a 1962 western / Meteorological description in a Beatles song / Poet Frank who led the 1950s-'60s "New York School" / Cutting onomatopoeia / Nickname for Oliver Cromwell / Unfortunate neighbor of Mount Vesuvius

Constructor: Chloe Revery

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)

THEME: FIRST LADY (58A: Title for Jackie or Jill, and a hint to the answers to the starred clues) — "first" words of theme answers can all follow the word "LADY":

Theme answers:

• GAGA ABOUT (17A: *Crazy for)
• LIBERTY VALANCE (23A: *Title role for Lee Marvin in a 1962 western)
• LUCK OUT (36A: *Get seriously fortunate)
• MARMALADE SKIES (48A: *Meteorological description in a Beatles song)

Word of the Day: Frank O'HARA (16A: Poet Frank who led the 1950s-'60s "New York School") —

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. (wikipedia)

You know that feeling when you're humming along, just loving a puzzle, and then someone goes and dumps a bucket of TUCKET all over it? No? Well, neither had I, before today. What a tragedy. Gorgeous to gruesome in no time flat. When you're out of luck(et), and feel like "f*ck it!," bring in the TUCKET. The TUCKET (as it will now be known, with the definite article out front) has not been seen or heard from in over three decades. It was believed extinct. Or perhaps mythical—who even remembers 1992? But today, it returns from its decades-long hibernation / mystical journey and slimes its grim way right across my MARMALADE SKIES. "With tangerine trees, and [record scratch] TUCKET Surprise!" I cannot say enough about the monstrosity that is TUCKET. I want to put it in a bucket and chuck it. If this seems like an outsized reaction, well, first of all, hi, have we met? And second of all, I refer you to the opening words of this paragraph—I thought this puzzle was (otherwise) fantastic. The quality gap between TUCKET and the rest of this puzzle is a gulf, a chasm, it cannot be measured, you cannot see the other side of the canyon from TUCKET. I mean, I didn't *know* BANTU (as clued) (22D: ___ knots (hairstyle)), but at least I recognize the word (it's an African people / language group), and anyway, hairstyles are not in my purview—if you tell me something is a hairdo, I believe you, because my own personal hair style is NIL. But TUCKET ... TUCKET isn't just something I didn't know. It's something that should not, and possibly does not, exist. Is it real? Am I typing or still in a crossword nightmare. It *is* the 40th anniversary of Nightmare on ELM ST, maybe I'm in the middle of one of those situations, still asleep and being chased by Griddy Kruger, aka The TUCKET. Whether I'm awake or asleep, TUCKET remains very bad (please congratulate me on getting through that paragraph without using "suck it").