Lead-in to coin, for a meme currency / SUN 10-6-24 / James Joyce short story set in a bazaar / John Singer Sargent portrait that scandalized Paris in 1884 / Thick plank of a ship / 2001 title role for Audrey Tautou / Fangorn Forest inhabitants, in fiction / Bandmate of Ginger, Scary, Posh and Baby / Longtime guitarist for the Eagles / The "O" in a H.O.R.S.E. poker tournament

Theme answers:

• "DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS" (22A: Mrs. B you'll die when you hear what happened to "me" this summer.)
• "YOUR MONEY'S NO GOOD HERE" (37A: So we're at the convenience store and WOW I find a 5$ dollar bill on the floor)
• "HALT, WHO GOES THERE" (45A: Surprise surprise! Whom should walk in? Just my best friend ever!)
• "DON'T START WITH ME" (64A: Me and Jamie ask if we can get a couple of scratchers)
• "ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE" (83A: My mom buys them, and she knows how much I loooooooove lottery tickets)
• "PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER" (92A: "Scratch them your self girls," she says, so we do")
• "YOU CAN'T WIN THE MALL" (i.e. "THEM ALL") (111A: OMG can you believe it! We won the mall!!!)

Word of the Day: SHEENA, Queen of the Jungle (54A: "Queen of the Jungle," in comics) —

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, is a fictional American comic book jungle girl heroine, originally published primarily by Fiction House during the Golden Age of Comic Books. She was the first female comic book character with her own title, with her 1941 premiere issue (cover-dated Spring 1942) preceding Wonder Woman #1 (cover-dated Summer 1942). Sheena inspired a wealth of similar comic book jungle queens. She was predated in literature by Rima, the Jungle Girl, introduced in the 1904 William Henry Hudson novel Green Mansions.

An orphan who grew up in the jungle, learning how to survive and thrive there, she possesses the ability to communicate with wild animals and is proficient in fighting with knives, spears, bows, and makeshift weapons. Her adventures mostly involve encounters with slave traders, white hunters, native Africans, and wild animals. (wikipedia)

Awkward from start to finish. Speaking of the finish, let's start there—what is this ridiculous post-solve Post-It that appears on my grid after I've (successfully!) completed the puzzle (see screenshot, above). "C+ / Fix"??? If only the editor had put that Post-It on this puzzle the first time he saw it. It's not even funny, or apt. Why "C+"? And what the hell does "Fix" mean, exactly? No teacher, however bad at their job, would affix this Post-It note, with this particular message, to any paper at any time. It's nonsensical. "Fix!" LOL. OK! Could you be more specific? Yeesh. As a solver who (again, successfully) completed this damn puzzle (and in good time too), I don't know where the puzzle gets off slapping a "C+ / Fix" Post-It on my finished grid. Just bizarre. And intrusive. And again, in no way funny. There's no ... joke. No wordplay. Nothing. A corny tacked-on gimmick that can't possibly have been part of the original puzzle design. I envy you dead-tree solvers who didn't have to endure this little "extra." 

But back to the theme. The whole thing is forced. That is, the phrases just don't work (for the most part) as teacher comments. "DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS"? ON THIS? "Don't quote 'me' in this (sentence)," maybe, but "ON" this is just ludicrous phrasing, from a teacher-note perspective (Also, sidenote: really feel like the more common phrase is "DON'T QUOTE ME ON THAT"). "YOUR MONEY'S NO GOOD HERE" actually works pretty well, but the "HALT" part of "HALT, WHO GOES THERE," doesn't really make sense, and as for "DON'T START WITH ME," sigh, the problem isn't the starting with 'me,' it's the using of 'me' at all. That is, if your sentence read "Jamie and me ask if we can get a couple of scratchers," you wouldn't be starting with 'me,' and yet It Would Still Be Wrong ('me' is the objective case, but as the subject of the sentence, obviously the nominative 'I' is called for here). The next two work OK ("ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE,""PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER"), but then the themer set ends on a severe clunker, which I think is supposed to be the "hilarious" grand finale, but ... all the other answers make sense as written, whereas "YOU CAN'T WIN THE MALL" requires you to retain the spacing in "THE MALL" in order for the teacher's comment to make sense. Luckily, I realized early on that I didn't need to read the clues at all—they were convoluted and obviously only going to annoy me, so I just waited for familiar phrases to come into view and then wrote them in, never even glancing at the theme clues. Really easy. Really really easy.

There were so many other things I wanted to correct about these stupid sentences. Where's the comma after "Mrs B" or "your self"? Why is WOW all-caps? Why no question mark at the end of "OMG can you believe it!"? Also, from a crossword editor perspective, why is there a full stop at the end of the first imagined sentence but no end-of-sentence punctuation on any of the others (except the exclamation points on that last one)? So many things about the puzzle feel unpolished an un-thought through. And the fill ... it's oof all around. So many bad short plurals. ORDS! OYS! OOHS! SYNS! An entirely unwelcome "meme currency" clue on the regular old Italian title DOGE. A (to me) obscure Joyce short story ("ARABY") (??) (44A: James Joyce short story set in a bazaar). ECOL when it should be EVOL (I mean, you invoked Darwin, for god's sake, come on!) (106D: Darwinian subj.). The nonsensical DEMONICAL (we dropped the "AL" a long time ago) (119A: Devilish). LIPASE? MEINE? MAZY!? It was hard to find a reason to smile today. I should be grateful that ... what, almost half of the themers kinda worked? MUSCLE CARS and JOE WALSH and ABLE SEAMAN add some manly musk, I suppose. SWEAR JARS, OK, good. But overall, this wasn't a ton of fun to solve. And then to "reward" my successful solve with that absurd Post-It, ugh. Fix!

Bullets:

• 8A: John Singer Sargent portrait that scandalized Paris in 1884 (MADAME X)— I have an idea which portrait this is, but let's see if I'm right ... [sound of search engine whirring] ... yep, that's it. You've seen it around, probably. Like a fine art version of a Gorey cartoon. So much lithe ennui.

• 80A: They might be said to be dancing or raging (FLAMES) — I've said a fire is "raging," maybe. FLAMES, I dunno. This one was oddly hard for me (but then "word that can precede / follow X & Y" clues always are)

• 79A: "Licensed to ___" (Beastie Boys album) ("ILL") — I've known about this album forever—their debut album, a seminal album of my Gen X teendom—and it was only today that I learned it was "Licensed," not "License."

• 67D: Thick plank of a ship (WALE) — I know this as a corduroy term. Also, a rapper. According to wikipedia, "A wale is one of the strakes of wooden planking that forms the outer skin of the hull of a ship, but substantially thicker than the other strakes." You're gonna have to look up "strakes" yourself. (note: STRAKE(S) has appeared in the NYTXW 13 times (!), but all of those times were 1986 or earlier)

• Lead-in to coin, for a meme currency (DOGE) — I don't want to dwell on this, but since a lot of you will be wondering wtf, here you go:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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