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Constructor: Peter A. Collins

Relative difficulty: Pretty Mondayish
THEME: Spell It Out — Theme answers are familiar phrases, the first words of which spell the letters "IT OUT."

Theme answers:

• 17A: *What a good speaker maintains with the audience (EYE CONTACT)
• 25A: *Golfers' bookings (TEE TIMES)
• 30A: *"Man!" ("OH BROTHER")
• 45A: *"Wait, wait ... go back" ("YOU LOST ME")
• 51A: *Bit of Boston Harbor debris in 1773 (TEA CHEST)
• 64A: Leave no room for misinterpretation ... or what the first words of the answers to the five starred clues do, literally (SPELL IT OUT)

Hi, everybody. PuzzleGirl here with your Monday puzzle while You-Know-Who is traveling. I hope you all are enjoying the holidays. We had a very low-key Christmas here at the PuzzleHouse. I spent most of Christmas Day backing up computers and phones and upgrading software on various computers and phones. You know, Christmas stuff. PuzzleHusband and I also completely geeked out on a jigsaw puzzle. Can't remember the last time I put one together, but I grabbed one at Target last week thinking the kids might enjoy it. Well, they had no use for it but it got done anyway due do our addictive personalities.
But hey, what about this puzzle? Nice little Monday jaunt, I'd say, until I got down to the Texas area of the grid. I had ELLE for MLLE.(61D: Fr. girl) and SAPPY for SOPPY(53D: Maudlin) so I just couldn't figure out what was wrong. I decided it wasn't worth fretting over so I just had Across Lite tell me the problem. I'm sure I would have eventually figured it out but I knew I needed to blog so didn't want to spend the time. I'm eager to know if that spot caused problems for anyone else.

Bullets:

• 1A: Titanic victim John Jacob ASTOR. Way to start us off on a light note.
• 21A: LITCHI nut (Chinese fruit). Do people know what these are? I'm pretty sure I've never heard of this.
• 29A: Fox News anchor Smith (SHEP). Not sure how he can stand to work at Fox News. He doesn't really seem to fit in with the rest of them.
• 69A: Letters between jays and ells (KAYS). I can't decide if I hate this because spelling out letters is lame or if I like it because it kind of matches the theme.
• 3D: October 31 option (TREAT). Tricky. (See what I did there?)
• 6D: Glam rock band MOTT the Hoople. As it turns out I don't know any Mott the Hoople songs. At first I thought I'd use "Flirtin' With Disaster," but that's Molly Hatchet. Totally different band.
• 10D: Thwarts (STYMIES). Both good words.
• 13D: Enjoys Joyce, Carroll or Oates (READS). Cute clue. I've read several Joyce Carol Oates books, but gave up on reading her when I tried "Missing Mom" back in 2005. I believe Ms. Oates must have fallen on her head and lost the ability to write a complete sentence. I could not follow (or finish) that book.
• 30D: Like integers of the form 2n + 1 (ODD). So now we need to do math. Great. Just great.
• 37D: Juillet's season (ÉTÉ). French!

And with that, I must take my leave. With any luck, Rex will be back tomorrow.

Love, PuzzleGirl