27A I think I’d replace “buddy”, which pushes one towards “pal” or similar words that were used more in the past, with “dude”, which is a little more modern, since “man” has maintained its popularity better.
Fun puzzle and theme! The circled letters helped; even after I picked up on the meaning of the parenthesized numbers, they didn’t help me much (other than 66A). Look forward to more puzzles and will Follow you here!
Other entries were good and liked a lot of the clues too! Some specific notes:
The 71A clue was funny.
I didn’t understand 31D.
Small typo in 62D.
I’ve never seen 68D spelled this way (though as I understand it, the “Y” character is either cognate with or came from the Dutch “IJ”.)