2. "A Small Family Business" (1987) It's hard to imagine a less placard-waving dramatist than Alan Ayckbourn, whose extraordinary output (more plays, at 77, than he is years old, 74 this week), tends to focus on suburban English families in psychic disarray.
In short order, though, Train of Thought was also derailed, giving way to less-than-soulful placards announcing subway improvements.
Obviously, a few persons walking slowly back and forth holding placards can be less obstructive of, for example, a public sidewalk than numerous persons milling around handing out leaflets.
Drivers with less severe disabilities receive ordinary placards and must pay at meters.
There's a woman in the store-signage business, figuring out a way to make grocery store placards that are hollow using less material and costing 20% less to produce.
The whole thing resembles a kind of adolescent playground nightmare, with all the cool kids getting chosen while the less coordinated players wait awkwardly under their placards.
Mulling the merits of explicatory placards in each gallery is less glamorous than signing checks for masterpieces, but Campbell can become as consumed by a discussion of signage as an urban planner puzzling over traffic management.
Had I factored in the self-destructive culture of greed, I could have spent considerably less time handing out leaflets and waving placards and spent considerably more time on the champagne aspect of the "champagne anarchist" life style.
So she sent a small army of volunteers across the islands, planting lawn signs and lining the roads with placards, running a campaign based less on policy than on personality.
There was little display in the convention hall, and even less in prime-time broadcasts, of the placards of the teachers' and service workers' unions, of the National Abortion Rights Action League and the Sierra Club.
We all know about the writers' strike losers: the scribes, salary-less and pacing with placards.
