Prisoner Cell Block H, My Mom, and My First Crossword Puzzle

By Purdy, Director of Publicity

Back in the 70s when I was in grade school and considered myself rather sly, I stayed home from school one day to catch the latest rerun of Courtship of Eddie’s Father (see photo above), which came on around 9:00am and then Prisoner Cell Block H, a British import drama about a female prison cell block ruled over by a ruthless brute of a woman named Queen Bea, and then perhaps try my luck on The Price is Right. This was going to be a completely self indulgent “me” day of relaxing in front of the “boob tube”. Around 9:05 am my mother mysteriously appeared on the stairs and was headed for the TV room. She was as surprised to see me as I her, and simply asked, “Not feeling well, honey?” I grabbed my tummy and managed to groan that I felt sick and decided to stay home from school.My mother passed into the kitchen and made herself busy. How could I have been so foolish as to have ditched school on her day off. When Prisoner Cell Block H came on she came to feel my head and sit with me while I feigned fatigue and nausea. She didn’t much care to watch Bea and the other women of Cell Block H menace one another and plot against the “screws”, and so went up to dress. When she returned she retrieved the paper, looked at me on the couch and asked, “Are you really sick, or just faking it?” The jig was up, she knew. I confessed immediately that I stayed home to watch TV all day. She didn’t yell or punish me, instead she sat down and read the paper. Five minutes later she asked if I wanted to help her do the crossword. Crossword? She never did the crossword. Sometimes my dad would do the kiddie crossword with me, but she meant the real crossword. Could my mother really be that bored?

Well, we spent the day toiling over that crossword, the Jumble, and the cryptoquote that appeared on the puzzle page. We consulted our Encyclopedia Britannica, our Rand McNally maps and atlases, and a non-OUP dictionary (that my mother still consults when doing a puzzle) trying to finish the puzzle. We would not give up. My mom and I became great good friends that day trying to finish that crossword, and it was the first of many that we struggled over through the last 30 years. My mom and I continue to be puzzlers. Whenever I go home I bring a bunch of half-finished New York Times Magazine puzzles. Usually there is a stack of mostly-finished puzzles piled up on the kitchen counter waiting for me to finish if I can. In recent recent years my mother made a friend at work who happened to create puzzles for Games Magazine. Sometime he sends some puzzles home for my mother and I to work on/struggle over. I now mark how successful a vacation home is by how many puzzles we managed to finish during my stay.

Below is one such puzzle from my mother’s colleague, Adam Fromm. Word is The New York Times recently accepted one of his puzzles for publication in the daily paper. Apparently Will Shortz knows a good puzzle author when he sees one. But Will Shortz has got nothing on me and my mom…we’ve been Fromm fans for years. Here’s his latest Mother’s Day puzzle. Enjoy, and remember to call your mother this Sunday if you won’t be home to puzzle with her.

I love you mom!

One Mother of a Crossword

In honor of Mother’s Day, we’re holding a (completely imaginary) Mothers-to-Be Film Festival, in the form of the crossword you see here. Each row and each column contains two to five entries, clued in order, to be entered consecutively with no spaces in between. Since we’re honoring Mom, though, we’d like to give her a little space of her own, so every time the letters M and A appear consecutively in any row or column, write them together in the same square; for example, the entry SOMALIA would only take up six squares: S O [MA] L I A. (This is true even if the M is the last letter of one entry and the A is the first letter of the next. So, if SQUIRM was immediately followed by AXE, they’d be entered as S Q U I R [MA] X E.)

Once the grid is filled, blacken in all of the “MA” squares. Having done this, it should be possible to trace a path that starts at the shaded square at the top of the grid and passes through every black square exactly once without retracing or crossing itself, moving only in straight horizontal or vertical lines and turning only at black squares, and ending finally somewhere along the bottom row. If all goes well, reading along this path should reveal the names of the three films being shown at the Film Festival—films about labor, naming the baby, and the nine-month wait, respectively.

Across

1)
• “______ was saying…” [2 wds] • Not-ready-for-release computer apps
• Conduit
• A bunch of beluga

2)
• Mansfield Park author [2 wds] • United Airlines hub

3)
• Improve, for Bordeaux
• Aggrieve
• In flames
• Not prohibiting alcohol sales

4)
• Bread in Bengal
• April Stevens’ “Deep Purple” singing partner [2 wds]

5)
• Handgun, slangily
• Last washing machine cycle, often [2 wds] • They may be square

6)
• Cross part
• Fighting [2 wds] • Polite female address
• Trounce in a game of strategy

7)
• 1992 Robin Williams flop
• Rooked
• Barcelonan dinner offering

8 )
• Pixieish
• Michael Brown’s one-time gov. agency
• HST’s presidential successor
• Swingers director Doug

9)
• Give a heads-up about [2 wds] • Lunatic
• Alternative to Tylenol

10)
• Applies unction to
• Eating habits
• Button on a VCR

11)
• Some Thanksgiving veggies
• Palindromic hit for ABBA
• Put a stop to
• Noted actor and bridge expert, with item 4 of 11 Down
• Welcome piece of decor?

12)
• Joy of Cooking author Rombauer
• Reubens’ nom de comedy
• Non-homeowners, frequently

13)
• Person on the short list
• IM chatter’s chortle
• It may be easy or high

14)
• Cilia
• Thing
• Homer’s cartoon dad
• The last Portuguese colony in China

15)
• “Major” or “Minor” constellation
• Like, mopey and depressed
• Doce meses
• Compete in track and field, maybe

16)
• Former filly
• Boss Tweed’s “Hall”
• “What’d you say his name was?”
• Some whiskey

17)
• Intersection point
• Fortune
• Award won by both Cher and Red Buttons
• Former press secretary Fleischer

18)
• “Understood.” [2 wds] • Tightly-kept border, metaphorically [2 wds]

19)
• The capital of Albania
• Weepy, perhaps

20)
• “For sure.”
• Part of AT&T, for short
• Bastes
• 2002 role for Salma

Down

1)
• Gaping
• Dell competitor
• Horrid cruelty

2)
• Arizona desert sight
• Hollywood’s “Sweater Girl” Turner
• Make like a lion
• McCall’s Magazine, as of 2001

3)
• Clumsy
• Time for Mother’s Day
• Psychoanalyst Erich
• “What ______ going to do?” [2 wds] • Meals with matzo and bitter herb

4)
• Commands
• The Secret of Roan _______ (Sayles film)
• Hopping mad
• Wolf

5)
• Contents of la mer
• Sprawling narrative
• Codswallop
• Like many a sundress [hyph]

6)
• Request for a too-loud radio listener [3 wds] • Shredded
• Licentious

7)
• Samwise portrayer Sean
• Flowing hairdo
• Weight
• Actress West or Marsh
• Main marinara ingredients

8 )
• Eminem hit with a Dido sample
• Harry’s “Night Court” DA
• Football coach John, or director John
• Biopic named after a Bill Withers hit [3 wds]

9)
• Misshapen
• Primary
• Member of the Gypsy tribe
• Freight boat

10)
• Solidarity
• Peculiar
• Homer’s most notable neighbor
• Jab in the ribs
• Skips school, slangily

11)
• Center
• Kill the volume
• Post-haste [2 wds] • (see item 4 of 11 Across)

12)
• Term paper
• Some larger dress sizes
• Calculus 302 student, usually [2 wds] • Glastonbury _____

13)
• North American fruit tree
• State capital on the Missouri
• Legend among automakers?
• Folksinger Difranco

14)
• Ex-Dodger Hershiser
• Author O’Flaherty
• Sacred Gounod aria based on Bach [2 wds] • Great amount

15)
• Can’t tolerate
• Salamanders
• Lasso
• To Live and Die _____ [2 wds]

Check back later today for the answers.