You can buy a drink in Plano, but it's not that easy.

There are no bars or liquor stores allowed in this booming city of 240,000, Texas's ninth largest, 30 miles north of Dallas, which is also dry-ish. Supermarkets and groceries in 40 percent of Plano's opulent 72 square miles may not sell beer or wine. The rest can. You just have to know which is which.

Plano's 126 restaurants do sell drinks, if you hand over identification and sign a form to ''join'' the establishment's ''private club,'' a practice common in Texas' nominally dry areas.

Texas is a patchwork of dizzying gradations of wetness, a carryover from Prohibition and arcane laws devised to protect varying interests. But people in Plano and a growing number of other localities are mobilizing to do something about it.

A new state law easing rules for local referendums on alcohol sales has allowed citizens here and elsewhere to organize intricate petition drives to liberalize liquor laws community by community.