Ok, so I misread the reveal clue as being for 59A and stupidly sat there sounding out ARGUE. Hope you found at least some of this puzzle enjoyable. But otherwise, this played like a normal easy Monday. I mean, those are *definitely* "unintentional," whereas maybe you *meant* to bring home SAND from the beach. Seriously thought (for a second or so) that there was some kind of rebus afoot, and the answer was SUN. I guess you get SAND in your towel and various bags and garments and thus you "bring it home" but that clue is a stretch, and the stretchiness adds vagueness and thus difficulty. SEASHELL was easy enough, but SAND was not. Not surprisingly, I had difficulty only when the cluing tried to get cute, which today came with the tie-in clues about the things brought home intentionally/unintentionally from the beach. Not sure I'd put ARCO and ARCS in the same grid (since they're both related to bows) (from L. ARCO ACAI ERRS didn't have me too hopeful coming out of the NW, but the fill picked up after that. I enjoyed seeing CHAUCER (my old friend) and GUERNICA, and CINCO DE MAYO makes for a pretty lively long Down there in the SE. Outside the theme, the fill was decent, maybe even slightly better than the usual Monday fare. Plus, you gotta wonder why you'd drive right into the whole cultural appropriation mess (see video, above). And speaking of not Monday famous, what in the actual heck is going on with the clue on " APACHE"!?!?! If you know the Sugarhill Gang, you know them for the ultra-famous early rap hit "Rapper's Delight." I have literally never heard of " APACHE," which is fine, I haven't heard of many things, but I really think this is a strange way to approach a Monday clue: to take an ordinary tribal name and turn it into a Saturday-level trivia question. I'm sure the FONDA THEATRE exists, but it doesn't strike me as famous. Am I supposed to know the FONDA THEATRE? I know FORD'S THEATRE (-RE again, what the hell, are all non-movie theaters spelled that way!?). Leave the -re stuff to the Brits (and Canadians and what not). Also, what the hell is the FONDA THEATRE? And why is it spelled Britishly? Man, I hate when American theaters do that. So anyway, you get the SHONDA rhymes that you get, and what you get is fine, though it was a little weird to get a TV series creator as the revealer and then a TV series she *didn't* create as one of the themers. She played Jimmy Cagney's faithless girlfriend in the 1949 crime classic "White Heat" (" I made it, ma! Top o' the world!" ). the '40s and '50s-my movie wheelhouse, but probably not yours). I blame the Beach Boys' "Help Me, RHONDA." The only well-known RH- RHONDA I can think of is RHONDA Fleming, an actress of yore (i.e. Vonda Shepard is a singer and Vonda McIntyre was a scifi writer of note, but you couldn't use them on a Monday, and as for RHONDAs, turns out that name *feels* a lot more common than it really is. The RHONDAs and VONDAs of the world probably feel a little left out, but the fame factor on those folks isn't exactly Monday-level. A straightforward repurposing of a famous person's name.
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