Sunday evenings, or early in the week, I often exchange Sunday Spelling Bee results with Larry, a doctor who is the husband of a colleague of mine at Hunter. He’s a hoot because he often comes up with rafts of wonderful medical words that don’t stand a chance of getting accepted. And we chit chat a bit about the week’s events. This week he mentioned that the Wordle competition between his wife and himself is heating up, and he’s concerned it may end in divorce. I’m sure he was kidding, but it made me think there should by now be some Wordle-based cartoons in the New Yorker — maybe a scene in divorce court? I gave it some thought (no more than 5 or 6 hours — I have stuff to do!), and here’s what I came up with: A guy is on the couch in his shrink’s office and he’s saying: “I thought all those notes starting with Adieu were her Wordle tries. It turns out she left me two weeks ago.”
[For those of you who do not Wordle, adieu is a very popular first try.]
Palindromic Cuban-born actress ANA DE ARMAS, 34, may be the most beautiful woman in the world. At least I wouldn’t want to be the poor slob having to argue the case against it. You may have seen her as the nurse in Knives Out in 2019, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. She also played “Bond girl” Paloma in No Time To Die in 2021, and more recently Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. De Armas married actor Marc Clotet in 2011, but they divorced in 2013. She dated Ben Affleck from March 2020 to Jan. 2021. There is a very good chance there is no man on the planet worthy of her.
I mention Ana because she is one of seven women in today’s puzzle who form a “word ladder” with their three-letter first names. That is, you progress from each rung (name) to the next by changing one letter. Here they are:
- INA GARTEN (18A: The Food Network’s “Barefoot Contessa”)
- IDA B. WELLS (22A: Civil rights leader who co-founded the N.A.A.C.P.)
- ADA LOVELACE (29A: Mathematician regarded as the first computer programmer)
- ANA DE ARMAS (35A: Portrayer of the nurse Marta Cabrera in “Knives Out”)
- AVA DUVERNAY (47A: Director of the miniseries “When They See Us”)
- EVA MENDES (54A: “Girl in Progress” star with a line of cosmetics)
- EVE ENSLER (59A: “The Vagina Monologues” playwright)
The names are also symmetrical. I.e., each of the names in the pairs 1 and 7, 2 and 6, and 3 and 5 are the same length. For that reason, Ava Gardner could not have replaced Ava Duvernay. And four of the names are palindromes: ADA, ANA, AVA, and EVE.
Rex also noted, though it may not have been intentional on the part of the constructors, that the ladder starts with IN A GARDEN (“INA GARTEN”) and ends with EVE. On Rex’s blog he posted a very funny photo of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, consoling IVA Archer on her exclusion from the puzzle.
Did you know playwright Eve Ensler changed her name to V? After publishing her book The Apology in 2019, where she described sexual and physical abuse by her late father, Ensler stated she wished to distance herself from his surname and be called by the mononym V.
After graduating from Middlebury College in 1975, she had a string of abusive relationships and became dependent on drugs and alcohol. In 1978, she married Richard Dylan McDermott, a 34-year-old bartender, who convinced her to enter rehab. When she was 23, she adopted her husband’s 16-year-old son Mark from his first marriage. Their relationship came to be a close one, and V said that it taught her “how to be a loving human being.” After V suffered a miscarriage, Mark took the name she had planned for her baby, Dylan.
V wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996 which was first performed in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. Subsequently, the play was translated into 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Celebrities who have starred in it include Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Idina Menzel, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Sandra Oh, and Oprah Winfrey.
Among her many honors, V received a Tony Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, and has been named a Lion of Judah for her commitment to Jewish causes. Of course, her greatest honor is her inclusion in today’s puzzle.
Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi on July 16, 1862 and was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. She was one of the founders of the NAACP and was a fearless and brilliant journalist. She died in 1931, at age 69. In 2020, Wells was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize special citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” And just last year Memphis dedicated the Ida B. Wells plaza with a life-sized statue of her. It is adjacent to the historic Beale Street Baptist Church, where Wells produced her Free Speech newspaper.
That’s as good an image as any to end on today. Happy Puzzling!
The Wellington Files 