Watch That Sign

After several reminders to check on lawn signs to make sure they hadn't been nabbed, ArtFarm and Circus For A Fragile Planet Director Dic Wheeler sent this tongue-in-cheek report.

Happy to say that our sign is surviving, but only because we have kept an all night vigil in the bushes in front of our house. It's a jungle out there!

What a night...first the city workers came, carefully measuring the distance from street to sign, searching for potential infractions. They left disappointed as we had already measured to the centimeter and met all regulations.

Then came the Democratic SWAT team, unruly, cocky with the swagger of years of owning the streets, and began to approach my sign. My nine year old (it was his shift) popped out of the bushes and told them to leave that sign right there. The infiltrators stopped, counted heads, realized they did not have a quorum, and walked out.

The sign in question.




After a long delay to squabble with the Board of Education about whose responsibility it was to steal signs, the Republican team emerged from the shadows. They almost got away with our sign by distracting me with an old video interview I had done about Draft Registration in 1980, but we cut them off at the driveway with a "Got Signs?" countersign. That scared them away.

Next were the Libertarians, hard to defend against because they were coming from all different directions with no clear goal or route just as long as nobody told them what to do. I was in a panic, all of them pulling at my sign and each other, until I suddenly shouted that Ron Paul had just been sighted on South Main Street and they all turned and ran as one in that direction.

Then Fred Carroll came. Raked all the leaves off my front lawn. Nice guy.

As the sun was rising a crowd of young folks approached and put an "Occupy Middletown" sign next to my Ed McKeon sign. Started playing music and repeating everything that I said to my neighbors across the street, who then passed the message on to their neighbors, who passed it on, and last I heard the message was working its way downtown house by house.

Has it reached you yet? It may end up like a big game of telephone and get garbled, but it started out as something like "Stealing lawn signs is a petty silly thing, and there must be a more grown up way to engage in civic dialog."

We are all tired from last night's vigil. Tonight I just asked my Occupy Middletown friends to keep an eye on it, and just in case I sunk 40 pounds of concrete into my front lawn and secured the sign in that. I dare you to try and pull it out!