DRINKS ARE ON ME? What a nice offer, Gary! Make mine a quadruple — that is, four drinks literally atop the bigram ME. I had a nice ...
read moreDRINKS ARE ON ME? What a nice offer, Gary! Make mine a quadruple — that is, four drinks literally atop the bigram ME. I had a nice a-ha after putting in SIDECAR as a [Motorcycle attachment], and then realizing that a SIDECAR is also a mixed drink.

The others didn't work as well for me, as the drink definitions of MIMOSA, GIMLET, and MARTINI are much more recognizable than their … whatever else they are. The MIMOSA is a tropical tree? A GIMLET is embarrassingly unrecognizable to this mechanical engineer as a [Hand tool for boring holes]?
And maybe I should know Danny DeVito's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" role, as a character named MARTINI? It is a classic movie, I suppose. Huh.
Point is, it's much nicer when the drink is disguised in another easily recognizable form. Perhaps a SCREWDRIVER or BLOODY MARY would have been better. Tougher to build around, for sure, but more fun. Especially for a Monday puzzle that's supposed to be easy!
Speaking of tough to build around, DRINKS ARE ON ME is 13 letters, such a dread-inducing length. Plunking it down in the center of the puzzle already takes away so much precious flexibility. I can see why Gary chose to stick to shorter drinks. Much easier to wedge in MIMOSA than to jam in a long SCREWDRIVER.
That sounded a lot dirtier than it really was.
Although you can shift the ME letters left and right a lot, having those extra letters is still an additional set of constraints. Gary did pretty darn well to hold the crossword glue to just some APAR, EPS, STE. FLACKS did sound odd to me in the plural, but it does get dictionary support as [Press agents]. Huh.
A bit repetitive to fill in those MEs — once you hit the revealer, it's all too easy to fill in whatever MEs you haven't gotten to yet. But I liked the playful theme notion and really liked how Gary disguised his SIDECAR.