Today's theme entries are personal names respelled so they can be interpreted as verb phrases, for example, "Cradlin' a Salinger protagonist?" is HOLDINCAULFIELD and "Bein' in debt to a 'Wedding Crashers' co-star?" is OWINWILSON. It's a fine theme idea, but the variation in the way names were modified to become verbs - three of the five simply substituted an I for an E while the other two required some additional letter swapping - threw this solver for a bit of a loop and caused a real slow down in the middle left area. If I had automatically known Kevin Bacon was in "Footloose" I probably wouldn't have had so much trouble with it, but that lacuna combined with the K from TRANK (where one would expect the C in Bacon) briefly befuddled me. It didn't help that KAT Dennings and birthplace of Zeno (ELEA) were unknowns.
Two death and burial clues threw something of a pall over the puzzle for this solver. Clunky fill like GOTAC ("Did so-so at school") and NTILE ("One-point Scrabble draw"), NOTI ("Moi? Never!), and SYSOP ("Internet admin") didn't exactly RADII puzzle bliss. And call me NITPICKY, but the number of abbreviations (GAH, ELO, NHL, YSL, AFL, DNA, GMT, IEDS, RMS), not to mention three texting shortcuts all in the same section (FWIW, BTW, IMO), made a real alphabet soup of this one.
A few clever clues resulted in some AHA moments that brightened the landscape including "Blond at the bar, say" (ALE), "Bee teem?" (SWARM) - ha! - and "Crow, but not magpie" (VERB). Fill-wise, I liked SHINNY - you don't see that every day.
So, some things to grumble about, but nothing a little Dustin 'Offman of acronyms wouldn't have remedied.
~Frannie.
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