35: how do you like them bananas?

my entry for crosshare's april 2022 midi challenge! (theme: "bananas")

thoughts (warning: spoilers)

this took quite a while to put together. at first my idea was just to do a "green"/"brown" schrodinger ("some people like their bananas with a bit of this color"), but then i got the terrible idea to do a three-way schrodinger with ALL YELLOW / A BIT GREEN / A BIT BROWN. to make it a little easier, i wrote a program to search my wordlist and print out all the potential candidates for each down entry crossing the middle.

i figured the triple-constrained slots at the fifth/seventh/eighth positions would be the toughest to fill, so i made those my first priority. slot 5 happened to work out perfectly, with B/E/G FLATS all being musical notes.

the others weren't so friendly. my program found ESE/ESL/ESO for slot 7, and i thought, "hmm, ESE and ESO both mean 'that' in Spanish, and ESL is a class that a native Spanish speaker might take... there must be some way to make this work." i'm actually quite happy with the clue for that one---i think the painfully forced double meaning is kind of funny. probably the best i could have done given the circumstances. NAE/NAO/NAW is also weak, with the frustratingly vague "certain folks" (NAE = scottish, NAO = portuguese, NAW = appalachian american i guess?), but i'm just glad there was something that worked at all.

the rest of the slots were mostly solid. i was very happy to get BLUSHES/BRUSHES in slot 6, and YDS/TDS in slot 4 is also great. i spent a long time agonizing over slot 9, not realizing that NNW/WNW was right there the whole time. FAIL/FALL is also pretty good, although i feel like "eat it" lends itself more immediately to FALL than to FAIL.

the only truly rough one was slot 2. at first i had BUMP/LUMP ("protuberance"), but that forces a 2-letter word below it, and i decided i didn't want that. after hours of combing through the list of possibilities and scouring xwordinfo for cluing angles, i finally found a workable angle on BIT/LIT and plopped it in. it wasn't until i'd finished filling in the entire grid that i realized BIT is a dupe :'( at that point, i was too sick of working on this puzzle to care, so i just left it in lol. (there's also a dupe of "artists" in the 22D clue with ARTS at 12D, which i was also too tired to fix. might as well embrace it, y'know?)

other than that, i'm pretty happy with the puzzle. i got some fun bonuses in there (POOHBAH, THE FAM, HEY YA), and i had some fun with alliteration on a few clues. question: is GO YOU a phrase that's familiar to people? i feel like i recognize it as a thing people say, but it's not in any wordlist and not particularly well-documented online, so maybe not.

hope you enjoyed! p.s.: if you have a better solution for any of the schrodinger crossers, let me know, i'd love to see it :)