The answer is SPRING BREAK — letters of SPRING in order, broken up by other letters. A Slinky is a spring (though as one solver specified, only the newer type made from plastic is technically a spring. The old metal ones are just stretchy things; I’m not sure I understand why, but I’ll take his word for it. So the proper title of the puzzle should have been Plastic Slinky Interruptions. My apologies to those who were misled.)
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This was not exactly a MGWCC Week 4. At closing time, the count of solvers off the couch and presumably floating about the room was 53.
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Some solvers noticed that the letter U is common to all the theme entries. That was inadvertent. It’s hard enough to come up with four phrases that don’t repeat the SPRING letters. I mean, look at the ridiculousness of the theme entries; and those were the best I could come up with. To do so without having one of the four remaining vowels in common was beyond me.
The history of this puzzle is this. Two weeks ago, when Brian announced that there would be no Monday Meta, someone (boharr?) commented that the MMM was on Spring Break. That gave me the idea, and I threw this one together fairly quickly and sent it to Brian at 11:00 pm that evening. But by then Schmeel had already checked in with a much better puzzle (“Kitty Corner”). So “Spring Break” was postponed, and in the one-week interim, spring break itself, unfortunately, became newsworthy.