MUSICAL INTERLUDE

Barbara Lin is a computer engineer in West Chester, Pa. She says her work is like constantly solving puzzles. "The difference is that in engineering there's no answer key."

She has been constructing crosswords for about a year and a half. This is her third puzzle for The Times and her first Sunday.

I'm thrilled to have my first Sunday puzzle in the New York Times. I started working on theme entries for this puzzle several months before I had the confidence to make the puzzle. Filling my first 21x21 grid, which this theme requires, was kind of intimidating. Thanks to the editorial team for keeping my best clues, and for coming up with others I wish I had thought of.

I don't remember how I initially came up with the idea for this puzzle. During a recent visit by my mother-in-law, however, I came up with a guess for how it probably happened.

My mother-in-law is an accomplished woman. She speaks several languages fluently, she taught Asian languages for many years in New York City public schools, she has worked at the UN and at Berlitz language schools, she published a Chinese cookbook, and she raised three successful children. For several years now, she has suffered from Alzheimer's Disease, a heartbreaking illness. My husband heard about Alive Inside, an award-winning documentary showing that many people with advanced dementia respond to music in an exciting way. He made a playlist of songs that my mother-in-law knew in her younger days; we found that the music helps her, so she hears the songs every day.

When she visits us, I hear the songs on the playlist multiple times. The first song on the playlist, the one we hear the most often, is a certain song from The Sound of Music. So I'd like to give my mother-in-law (and Julie Andrews) credit for sparking the idea that led to this puzzle.

I enjoy working with new constructors, helping to bring their seed ideas into fruition, and DO RE MI concepts are some of the most common theme proposals. These days, I usually gently nudge people away from them, because they've become so overdone. Thus, I was predisposed to dislike today's puzzle as soon as I read the title and was able to fill in the circles with DO RE MI right off the bat. The three-letter SOL confirmed my hunch 100%, so what was left to solve?

Turns out Barbara found some neat transformations! I loved the GRACE to DOG RACE and SCARCE to SCARFACE changes, DONATION to DOMINATION felt dominant, and FOSTER to FORESTER also delighted me. I love neat wordplay, and these all qualified with high marks.

What a perfect title, too. MUSICAL INTERLUDE aptly hints at the DO RE MI notes interupting normal phrases. That alone was worth the price of admission.

I often don't laugh at "kooky" themes, but there's something so hilarious about ORGAN DOMINATION, the organist letting out all the stops to blow everyone away. An army of soldiers sporting PARASOLs instead of guns? If only the world could be so lucky! GLARE AT GRANDMA isn't funny in itself, but juxtaposing GRANDMA and "stink eye" got a chortle from me.

Barbara's weekday (15x15) gridwork has impressed me, exhibiting both color and cleanliness. Going to a 21x21 140-word puzzle ups the level of difficulty by a factor of about five or ten, though, so I shouldn't be surprised that there was an ENORM of MATIC EROO NUTRI ARMEE EDATE. Those five-letter gloopy bits are so much more noticeable than the shorter stuff like CTR LTD MRE TOR UAR.

Even the most promising new constructors have to learn the ropes. I have a feeling that Barbara will quickly find her way through these types of potholes more quickly than others, given how strong she already is with 15x15s.

It'd have been great not to have the circled letters, which gave away the game way too quickly, but the concept did exceed my fatigued DO RE MI expectations. Several wonderful wordplay discoveries.