Monday is Wash Day and in case we forget what to do, the August 11 debut by Thomas Heilman (answers) lays out the formula in order: wash, dry, press, fold. Got it. There are two additional ten-letter answers and two more eight-letter ones that don't seem to be part of the theme so after a while I decided I was a silly goose for even trying.
Sometimes it's surprising when common words make their debut. The "cowboy's greeting" is HOWDY. Sure the letters are a little odd, but still. It's appeared in other puzzles several times but I guess we're a little more formal at the Times, Ma'am.
GABE has appeared 11 times, each occurrence in reference to Mr. Kaplan of Welcome Back, Kotter fame. There's an archangel fuming in heaven, wishing he hadn't been so formal back in the day so he could have shared the crossword honor with that 70's TV star. Ayn RAND gets another reference. I shrugged too. Solvers should note that her birth name was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. That's going to show up in a puzzle some day.
Crosswords cover the gamut of life experiences so every once in a while, no more often than that, a puzzle echoes something you just encountered somehow. Last night after posting my Sunday puzzle blog, Robin, Shay and I went to see the Seattle production of that "opera set along the Nile" and today AIDA shows up at 57 Across.
I'm not a constructor so I don't know from personal experience, but it seems to me it must be hard to start your crossword career with a Monday puzzle which has so many constraints. As we say at the opera house after the lovers die a somehow romantic death by being buried alive, Bravo.
Update: It turns out this wasn't quite a NYT debut after all. Nearly exactly a year ago under the name Tom Heilman, he had this Tuesday crossword published. He's now Thomas and that means I had to manually update my database. His constructor thumbnail page is correct now. Cruciverb reports he also had a L.A. Times puzzle in 2007 which included the clue "workout for some surfers." The answer is CYBER SQUATTING.
The "bravo" still applies. Thanks, PhillySolver, for the correction.