Ha! The clue for 42A today is “End of one’s money,” and the answer was BOTTOM DOLLAR. The Joker noted: “Bottom dollars are what one pays for a BBL.”

The clue for 28D was “Stay out of it!,” and the answer was MYOB (“mind your own business”). Egsforbreakfast crafted this “invitation to a cheap introvert’s party:” BYOB and MYOB.

The clue for 9D was “High-tech security device,” and the answer was RETINALSCANNER. Egsforbreakfast noted: “If you don’t like canned retinals, don’t get a retinalscanner.”

At 39A, “Hennery” was the clue for COOP, and LMS chimed in with: “Love the word hennery because -ery is my favorite suffix. A connery could be a prison, amirite? I like that, in addition to denoting a place, -ery can be tacked on to indicate a kind of behavior – jackassery, quackery, etc.”

[I don’t have a favorite suffix. I need to get out more.]

At 52D, a “good name for a florist or optometrist” was IRIS. And I was thinking a good name for an optometrist or a proctologist might be “Rod.” (Ouch!)

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Bang the drums for Elayne Jones, who died last Saturday at the age of 94. She was a percussionist, and had quite a tale to tell. How did she choose percussion? “Racism,” said Jones . “Mr. Russ [her high school teacher] handed me a pair of drumsticks and said, ‘We all know that Negroes have rhythm.’ When my family would visit Barbados during my childhood, I loved the music and the dancing and the drummers, but it never entered my mind that I would play drums someday.”

Her talent took her to the High School of Music and Art in NY, and then to Julliard. Jones graduated from Juilliard in 1949, and that summer, she attended the Tanglewood Music Festival in the Berkhires, performing in the student orchestra. She studied with Roman Szulc, then-timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as other musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. She said the six weeks at Tanglewood were one of the happiest experiences of her life.

Her career began with the NYC Opera and then the American Symphony Orchestra led by Leopold Stokowski, who was a great supporter of Jones. When she subbed briefly with the NY Philharmonic in 1958, she became the first Black musician to perform with them. She encountered racism and sexism every step of the way. She was instrumental in introducing the concept of the “blind audition,” in which performers audition behind a screen so race is not a factor.

When an opening arose in the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, she was awarded the position with the support of Seiji Ozawa, the music director, and she quickly wowed the SF music critics. One wrote that her work was “so rounded and suave, I just about fell out of my seat.”

After two years, however, despite her excellence and the full support of Mr. Ozawa, she was denied tenure by a committee of seven white men, two of whom rated her talent at 1 out of 100. Audience members picketed and organized petition drives and Ozawa resigned, although he stated it was for unrelated reasons. Jones sued the orchestra and the musicians’ union. A judge ordered a second, supervised vote by a new committee, but she was denied tenure again, supposedly based on her intonation. She took a tenured position with the SF Opera and had a superlative career, but her experience with the orchestra remained with her, bitterly. “I think her greatest contribution to percussion was that she paved the way for women and non-white players in the mostly-white world of classical music,” a fellow timpanist said. “Also, her strength as a player and as a survivor. And she was so much fun to watch!“

[Linda and I have been attending concerts of the NJ Symphony for decades and their timpanist from 1971 until his retirement in 2015, was a much-loved Black musician, Randall Hicks. Sadly, Mr. Hicks passed away in 2019.]

This photo is the cover of Elayne Jones’s autobiography, published in 2019.

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My g-daughter Lianna is in 7th grade in the Summit NJ school district. So she’ll be in high school in two years, if all goes well, kinehora. So I get emails from the “Boosters,” with news about the high school sports teams. Is it common for a public school to have a women’s ice hockey team? Summit does. (And so does Chatham (I just looked it up.)) It sounds brutal. Here are a few sentences from the write-up of a recent game. No one died, but the language is pretty gruesome — slashing and killing seems to be a routine part of the vernacular:

“Josie DiFeo scored early after a turnover on the blue line. Later in the period, Anneliese Claus got called for a slash. While on the kill, Elizabeth Puskar got called for a crosscheck. We killed off a 5-3 penalty for 1:06 to keep it at a one-goal deficit. This was a huge kill for the girls.” 

Here’s the team:

I’ve wasted enough of your time — Happy Puzzling!