This month's museum pick...

Feathers, Banjos and Golden Slippers
at the Mummers’ Museum

The Museum Part 2 of 2 - click to see Part 1

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.”

The highly acclaimed winner of Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature spotlights the world of the Philadelphia Mummers and their annual parade.

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.