The down entries are much less breezy, but after a trip through the puzzle I had enough crossing letters to start pecking at them. Each one runs through the first letter of an across entry with bubbled letters; that’s meaningful.
Take 12-Down, “Like a momentous occasion / Office communiqué,” which intersects 34-Across, RAND, at its first letter. The answer that fits is MEMORABLE; problem solved, at least partially. MEMORABLE is “Like a momentous occasion,” of course. But what of “Office communiqué?” MEMO could work here, and those are the four letters before the circled R in RAND. Maybe that’s it, but it isn’t totally satisfying.
Now take 52-Down, “Masters / Elaborated.” 52-Down solves to EXPERTS, for “Masters”; the P in EXPERTS is the start of POUND, at 64-Across. EX certainly doesn’t work for “Elaborated,” does it? Hm. But what about EX POUND? Wrong tense, but it’s a start. Ah, and to finish, where does POUND end? Its last letter crosses the ordinary-looking entry at 43D: SHEDDED, for “Got less hairy.” If you start at 52-Down, make a right at 64-Across, and then turn down again, you can arrive — circuitously — at:
E
X
POUND
E
D
The perfect (and elaborate!) answer for “Elaborated.”
With new eyes, I returned to “Office communiqué” at 12-Down and added RAND to MEMO. The D in RAND intersects with 20D, which I actually had a hard time guessing from its clue, “Lollipop with a ‘mystery flavor.’ ” I lit upon this answer and the theme entry at about the same time; the candy is a DUMDUM (whose mystery flavor is what you get when you switch flavors in the dumdum machine without stopping to clean it, according to the Boy Scouts. Yum!). The complete zigzag theme entry is:
M
E
M
O
RAND
U
M.
Now, there is no revealer for this puzzle, at least in the puzzle itself. Look to its title, “Right on the Money,” for that. Talk about perfection. You’ve probably solved some more of those entries by now, the ones with the circled letters and the simple, specific clues. 29-Across, “Emerged as a victor,” solves to WON; 101-Across, “Craving,” solves to YEN. Did you make a connection between these entries, yet? RAND; POUND; WON; YEN. These are all global currencies, and “Right on the Money” is not just an idiom — it’s a specific instruction on how to solve the down entries in this theme.
Tricky Clues
37A. This “Euphemistic cry of frustration” is a debut, and one of many variations on a theme: DADGUMIT.
58A. This clue could have gone in a morbid direction. I was happy to see a bit of commercial history instead, all things considered. “Where to see heads of gladiators, informally,” solves to AMEX CARD; indeed, a centurion in profile was chosen as the logo for American Express in the 1950s. The company goes back a century before that and was once visually represented by a dog guarding a large shipping crate.