Feathers, Banjos and Golden Slippers at the Mummers’ Museum

by Dea Adria Mallin

Q: What is 2.55 miles long, 69 ft. wide, 12 ft. high, and covered with feathers?

A: The Philadelphia Mummers Parade!

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.”

The Museum

The museum is near the Delaware River, on Second Street (more familiarly called Two Street as the Mummers are called Two Streeters), where post-parade extravaganzas have taken place for, well, forever. Designed by the architectural firm of Ullen and Junker, with a cadre of exhibition designers too, the museum had all the potential to be sophisticated and urbane. But from its maximum admission price of $3.50, to the staff, to the mission, this museum is a labor of love, born of the working-class people who made it what it is.

The primary donors today are Mummers -- electricians, longshoremen, plumbers, policemen, firemen -- and Mummer family members, giving out-of-pocket. More than 2,000 ephemeral costumes and backpieces have been collected (on revolving display), from the early 1920s to the present, and they show the movement towards the contemporary Mummer.

In days of yore, that is, prior to World War II, costumes were handmade by the wives and other family members, many of them Irish. Each of the thousands of roses was tenderly embroidered, each piece of lace hand-tatted, and each sequin sewn expertly in a year-long labor of love, drawing from life and from fashion.

But since WWII, when women were likely to be working, the costumes have drawn inspiration from technology as well and are likely to be home-designed but commercially realized. In 1951, a museum text explains, a single costume might have needed 95 yards of ribbon, 375 padded flowers or fruits and thousands of tiny beads painted gold to make the shoes. And the costumes, when completely assembled for the Fancies, took 100 to 200 costumed page boys to help carry them.   

Interestingly, there has been virtually no technological change for the backpieces. Ordinary cardboard suffices because it is lightweight but can support feathers weighing as much as 100 pounds, carried on a man’s back for 10 hours.

The frame suits have a yoke, a leather harness, and spreaders, and these use welded steel rods for the understructure. Cardboard is mounted onto that and then fabric, mirrors, feathers and the rest are glued and stapled, and finally, the front and rear sections are matched and put together on the captain.

There is a photograph of a frame suit for “The King of Chess,” with the captain as the bishop. The plumed headdress rises about 12 feet heavenward, and the wings appear to extend at least 9 feet to the right and to the left with the other chessmen configured in the ebullient plumage.

The mumming tradition in Philadelphia goes back to the early Swedish and Finnish settlers of the 1600s, and later gets picked up and extended by immigrant Germans, English, Welsh, Irish, and Italians. In one of the earliest accounts, in 1839, of a mummers parade, Dr. Henry Muhlenberg, who established the Lutheran Church in America, wrote about men who met on the roads of Tinicum and Kingsessing (just outside Philadelphia but eventually incorporated) after Christmas, disguised as clowns and shouting and shooting. These were the descendants of the Swedes who had, over the centuries, extended their “Second Day Christmas” celebrations to welcoming in the New Year as masqueraders, parading the streets of old Philadelphia and making noise with bells as well as pistols and musket shots. Those who “shot” were called “shooters” – a term still used today though the practice was banned long ago.

These early Swedish mummers appointed a leader called the “speech director,” who did a little dance step and recited the following rhyme as the revelers approached each house to sing, dance, and ask for food and drink and maybe some coins:

Here we stand before your door,
As we stood the year before.
Give us whiskey, give us gin,
Open the door and let us in.
Or better, give us something hot:
A steaming bowl of pepper pot!

By 1808, the practice was so widespread that Philadelphia’s high society considered it a problem and passed an act declaring that masquerades, masquerade balls, and masked processions were a public nuisance. A quiet period ensued, but by the 1850s, the law was repealed, and the mummers were once again around and about.

High on the wall of the Museum’s entrance foyer is this old rhyme, and a guest book that shows the Museum hosting visitors from Florida to Minnesota, the Carolinas to California, Las Vegas to Lithuania. One young man from afar signed the register as “the proud grandson of the Captain of the Talbot String Band.

Here are the winning costumes from the current year, more costumes, a running video, oil portraits of costumed Mummers, a life-sized photo of a toddler Mummer costumed beguilingly as the chick inside a hatching egg, and display cases with enthralling Mummer Miniatures done by Elizabeth Woods in the 1940s to celebrate the Mummers for her small daughter. Every detail is done by hand: each figure is about five inches tall, with costumes replicating the originals; every musical instrument is worked out in 3-D; and every band member’s face is crafted from a photo of the actual member. Whether in miniature as “A Deck of Cards” or “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” or the unexpected and fearsome “The Spider and the Fly, ”or full size, in “Shakespeare in the Street” or “Spirit of the Phoenix,” the Mummers engage and enchant.

In the next high-ceilinged room are floor-to-ceiling blow-ups of the Mummers performing and tons of costumes on mannequins. Downstairs is the Hall of Fame, and upstairs are displays with textual explanations, more costumes, parade routes through the years, memorabilia, and the whole realm of unlikely instruments used by the string bands, including tenor, alto, baritone and bass saxophones, accordion, bell-lyre, mandolin, banjo, guitar, bass fiddle, and glockenspiel. Push a button under each instrument, and you get the Mummer sound that makes you instantly young. And foolish. I was alone on my second visit and for about ten freewheeling minutes. I pushed one button after another and strutted through the Museum. Those who hear the music may grow young, but the very weight of the glockenspiel alone would add about ten years to the band member.

The wall displays include the story of James A. Bland, born in 1879 in Flushing, New York, educated at Howard University as a lawyer, and the author of over 700 songs including Carry Me Back to Old Virginny and the Mummers’ signature Oh, Dem Golden Slippers. Bland was a successful minstrel in England who gave a command performance for Queen Victoria, but he died in poverty and obscurity, having been given credit for only 37 of his songs.               

The Library houses a collection of news clippings dating back to the 1800s, and has over 6,000 photographs, transparencies, films, phonographic records, videos, manuscripts, and parade publications. These archival materials are made available to other museums, schools, and cultural organizations, and traveling exhibits have been mounted by the Museum.

The Museum hosts children’s classes in mask making, a weekly concert with retired String Band  Mummers, and a “Going Up Broad Street” workshop on mummer costume-making. For Palma Lucas, the best days just might be the Rotary Club-sponsored visits by “special needs” kids and adults. When the retired String Band Mummers, calling themselves “The Hardly Ables,” play and strut in the Hall of Fame, Palma reports that “the visitors’ bodies come alive and their eyes sparkle.”

And although a museum cannot fully capture, even on its videos, the undulating formations and revelry of the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade, if you happen to be in Philadelphia during the summertime, the Museum holds a weekly Summer Mummers program on its parking lot. For a while, there was a Summer Mummers parade on the Parkway where I live, and I understood the wish to be one of them, as in my neighborhood, my Mummers. As in “ I wanna strut!” It’s irresistible.

To approximate the Mummers strut, you put on Oh, Dem Golden Slippers and you spread your arms, supporting an invisible cape. You pump your elbows. You rock and bob. You tilt your head. You strut forward and back, now sideways, and now in circles. Toddlers do it. Kids do it. And even sophisticated Philadelphians grow big smiles when they try to do it. Philadelphia businessman Max Raab, now 77 years old, was moved when he became a septuagenarian to make the movie “Strut,” so in case you can’t get to the Mummers Museum in Philadelphia, wherever you are, you can rent the movie and you, too, can strut.