Mark of literary distinction / MON 7-1-24 / Onetime rival of Volvo / Title in Italian nobility / Letter-shaped opening for a bolt / Comedian ___ Von / Like wetsuits and leotards / Othello's treacherous "friend"

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Well if you're going to do a (rather dull, been-done) last words = homophones puzzle, I guess this is how you do it. Give the people a revealer that makes the whole enterprise seem worthwhile. It's an OK but lackluster experience overall, until the revealer, which is genuinely clever. Nice wordplay. Well done. Still, thematically, it's about average. The revealer gives it a little bump, but the grid as a whole is kind of flavorless, so you end up in pretty middling territory overall. SKIN TIGHT adds a little sass and sexiness (30D: Like wetsuits and leotards), but otherwise, it's just OK, maybe even leaning toward below average—lots of ordinary / crosswordy fill (esp. T-SLOT, but also ENE LES OSHA URNS ROFL EEL etc.), and not a lot of spice. Nothing cringey, though. That's something. Well, THEO Von ... I wouldn't call that name "cringey," but it was completely unknown to me. Even after looking him up, I don't know how I would ever have heard of him. Just ... completely in one of my demographic blindspots. An early '00s reality TV star who is a frequent guest on the Joe Rogan Experience? It would be hard to engineer a more perfectly out-of-my-wheelhouse "celebrity" than that. A total and utter blank. Don't usually encounter those on Monday. THEOs I know include Epstein, Huxtable ... uh, Vincent Van Gogh's brother THEO. Apparently there is also a THEO James (an actor I don't know) and THEO Johnson (an NFL tight end I don't know). I just remembered the name THEO Ratliff but forgot how I knew it (16-year NBA veteran, 1995-2011). Ooh, there's also THEO Chocolate, which is pretty delicious (he said, hoping someone who works there would send him a complimentary box of chocolates). THEO is an extreme outlier today, familiarity-wise, for me, and (I'm willing to bet) for many of you too. Not a problem. Gettable from crosses. Not sure I'd call him Monday-famous, but I'm an out-of-touch old man; judge for yourself.

I have this rated as "Challenging" (from a Downs-only perspective) because I just couldn't get any traction for the longest time. I count thirteen (13!) Downs that I couldn't come up with at first pass, and I couldn't get enough Downs in any one section to infer even a single Across answer for what seemed like forever. TSLOT TWAIN GARAGE and TOT (all adjacent) were busts for me at first pass. TOT occurred to me (7D: Youngster), but so did BOY, and LAD, and even TAD; the others ... just didn't occur to me at all. I think I had T-HOLE or some kind of HOLE where TSLOT was supposed to go (16D: Letter-shaped opening for a bolt), and I wanted CAR LOT instead of GARAGE. The TWAIN clue was a very tricky clue (with the capital-M of "Mark" masked by its first-letter position in the clue, making you think it just meant "mark" and not "Mark TWAIN"), so I don't feel bad about not knowing that (13D: Mark of literary distinction). But when you can't put any Acrosses together, things start to feel kinda desperate. EMERGE and UMAMI were also not showing up for me at first pass. [Savory flavor] just wasn't enough to get me to UMAMI. I was looking for a specific flavor, not the general flavor of savoriness. Sigh. My first breakthrough came late, when I took a look at "OR--LLE---GH-" and thought "that's ORVILLE WRIGHT!" And I was right. And the "rights" kept coming. First FORTH- and then on back up the grid, slowly but surely. So weird to feel like I was absolutely dying out there, and then to get that one themer and from there be able to crawl my way back to ultimate victory. Really thought I was gonna end up a Downs-only bust today. But I made it all the way back up to FLOORMATS and bam, the end. 

Made one guess today. A lucky guess, but also a semi-informed guess. The problem was that I forgot how R.L. STINE spelled his name (11D: "Goosebumps" author R.L.  ___). Was not 100% convinced it wasn't STYNE (which would've given me MANY in the cross—totally plausible). But I think the only STYNE I know ("know") is a composer (Jule STYNE? Is that somebody?), and the more I thought about it, the more STINE just seemed right. MANI- is not as good an entry as MANY, but it's definitely one I've seen before (in conjunction with "pedi," as it is here today) (17A: ___-pedi (spa treatment)). So I had some confidence in the "I." Just not total confidence. But my "guess" paid off. What else? Nothing else? Pretty straightforward Monday: familiar old theme type, slightly elevated by a clever revealer, and then ... fill. Standard-issue stuff. Not bad, not good, just there. It'll do. See you later.