Mummers’ Museum

The performing arts may not have an official category called “mummery,” but in one of the oldest and most distinguished cities in the United States, home of the U.S. Constitution and first capital, the Philadelphia Mummers have been performing officially on New Year’s Day for more than 100 years in a 10-hour spectacle, along a two-mile stretch of Broad Street, with up to 10,000 marchers and up to a million spectators. And since the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, they have had their own Mummers Museum.

The Mummers

Playing and prancing all along the route to the reviewing stands at City Hall, the love for performance is manifest in everything: the strut, the Mummer sound of banjo, accordion, sax, and glockenspiel, and the costumery -- those proud $63-a-dozen ostrich plumes, those satins, those velvets, those sequins, those spangles, those jewels, those golden slippers (well, sneakers and shoes, spray-painted and beaded and sequined), and those triple-tiered parasols.

The revelry lasts just one day, but Mummers clubs work 365 days a year doing top-secret planning. Working according to elaborate rules, the clubs develop a new theme each year, set up musical scores for the bands, create costumes – often by pulling the materials of the old ones apart and reconfiguring them -- build sets and props and floats, choreograph dances and skits, and practice, practice, practice.

These days, the Mummers are comprised of four divisions: Comic Clubs, Fancy Clubs, String Bands, and Fancy Brigades. Comics, drawing on human tradition from the ancient Greeks to the medieval jesters, mimic, satirize, and ridicule people and institutions. Everything is fair game for the individuals, the couples, and the floats in the Comics.

The Fancy Clubs indulge the love of pomp and ceremony, exploding in extravagance, glamour, and glitz. They use large, elaborate frames of steel, wooden, and cardboard construction that must be at least six feet in diameter and from ten to fifteen feet high. The Fancy Brigades, which only recently separated from the Fancy Clubs, choose a theme, center it on the elaborately decorated Captain’s Float, and surround that float with marchers in spectacular costumes undulating in formation.

And then there are the String Bands, the beloved string bands. The time-honored greeting between rival string bands is “I wish you Number Two!” But what does Number One mean here? In terms of money, very little. The prize money is at best $9,500 and at bottom, about $1,000. For competitors in the different categories, says Museum Director Palma Lucas -- who has run the Museum since it opened 29 years ago and until just recently, ran it all six days of the week -- this doesn’t even begin to cover the $50,000 to $80,000 that the groups will spend on their costumes. Factor in at least ten months of practice and preparation, every weekend and many nights, and it’s just not the money.

“I’m not out here for anything but tradition,” says one Quaker City String Band member. These days, when rootedness and a sense of community are being replaced by the virtual realities of Internet connectivity, it warms the cockles of the heart to observe the bonding in the larger Mummers “family” as well as within each neighborhood, where the clubs serve as unofficial community centers, and within individual families.

Palma Lucas points out that her husband John, now 73, started with the Mummers at the tender age of six. His family had just moved to South Philadelphia, a block from the parade route, and on New Year’s Day, no one could find little John until they looked for him on Broad Street; there he was, in the middle of the Fancies, dancing and strutting by himself. Lucas’ sister married a second generation Mummer, and John ultimately earned the honor of captain of the Clevemore Fancy Brigade.

Even those who are not in the clubs are drawn into the whoosh of joyous frolic on New Year’s Day. One mayor in the 1940s was such a fan that he left his official city automobile to don a top hat, mount a white horse, and lead the parade up Broad Street.

“From Labor Day to New Year’s Day, you can see the clubs practicing near Two Street, underneath Interstate 95, because of the great acoustics,” says Jack Cohen, 43, and now the Museum’s official librarian. So taken was Cohen as a young teenager by the spectacle and the camaraderie among the Mummers that he volunteered to work at the Museum when it opened in 1976 and has been there ever since.

Like Cohen, as a Philadelphian I have always loved the Mummers, though I had to educate my parents, transplanted New Yorkers, about their existence. And while I was nowhere near their parade route growing up, in those days when television was new and entertainment was all up close and personal, it was a rite de passage for Philly’s teenagers to borrow the family car and pile in with friends at dawn, drive to the parade route, and get front seats. Boots, hats, gloves, stadium blankets, picnic baskets and Thermos bottles were all de rigeur. Though the weather wasn’t always 5˚ Fahrenheit as it was in 1918, we mostly froze, bonding as we met the test of braving it out till the end, at dusk, when the winners were announced. Later on, living in Center City on the Parkway, when my daughter was small, we could walk to the parade route to watch. Then, at dusk, we would follow the Mummers to their loading trucks on the Parkway where they would carefully remove their costumes and pile them into the rental trucks, losing some of their exotic and wildly colored feathers and sparkles in the process, which my child and I took home to make masks and winged things. We always hoped for an ostrich plume…

Asked about the tradition of men dressing up as women, Palma Lucas ignores psychology, looks me in the eye and says, “If you had to find a costume and didn’t have the money to buy one, what would you do? You’d go through your wife’s clothes, pick out something with spangles, and put that on. Or turn your jacket inside out to the shiny acetate lining and dress that up!” Today, the “wenches” are an official category in the Comics, and more than 1,500 men and boys in dresses compete for special wench prizes. Interestingly, in the 21^st century, women are no longer just in the supportive background but right out there in the wintry weather, performing alongside their men, the “wenches.”

Feathers, Banjos and Golden Slippers at the Mummers’ Museum [click to see Part 2]

continued—this month's Museum Pick