Acrostic Protest

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The Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, where more than twenty thousand pounds of boiled lobster are served to fairgoers every summer, is a regular target of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). One year PETA took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper featuring a letter from actress Mary Tyler Moore, who asserted that boiling lobsters is cruel. Another time, PETA friend Fred Schneider, of the band B-52s, urged his audience at a concert in Boston to boycott the festival. This year PETA’s protest took a subtle turn — so subtle, in fact, that we wonder if anyone would have gotten the message had PETA not spelled it out on its Web site. There, on the festival’s opening day, PETA posted a photograph of a commemorative brick it had purchased at Fenway Park in Boston. Etched into the red clay is a Red Sox cheer: “Lead Our Bo Sox To Early Runs! Late Inning Blasts! Easy Routs! A Trophy In Our Name!” The message is to be read in the first letters of each word. How many people this baked lump of clay convinced to forego an unnamed festival two hundred miles away is anyone’s guess. —Virginia M. Wright

Photograph Courtesy PETA