Broad Jump

This year was my first Mummers Parade.

by Brian Howard

I, Brian Howard, Philadelphian for nigh on 20 years, had never been to the Mummers Parade.

Oh, I'd watched at least some of it on TV just about every year I've been conscious, from my childhood in Bethlehem to the last 10 years, when I've been curled up, hung-over amid the bottle- and red cup-strewn wreckage of my New Year's Eve parties.

And sure, I've made my way through throngs of wenches on Snyder, risked traffic snarls driving across Broad and stumbled through the silly-string entanglements near Two Street. But I'd never stood and watched the big parade. It was always something I vowed I'd do next year, if I managed not to get loaded the night before. It was a major oversight, I realize. This year, I corrected it.

I'd always appreciated, as U.S. Rep. Bob Brady once insisted in a City Paper editorial board, that "Mummers is cultures." But what you see on TV doesn't get to the heart of it.

As my girlfriend and I mummy-walked up Broad from Tasker on Friday afternoon, rough around the edges, queasy-stomached and generally worse for wear, the string bands were making their way toward City Hall — one platoon of sequinned compatriots and their scenery-laden Penske lag-wagons at a time. On TV, all you see are the sort-of-hackneyed/sort-of-charming choreographed performances, the high-stepping, the sax honking, the banjo thrum. It's the moments in between where this thoroughly bizarre tradition really imprints on your brain. The moments where you get to look into the eyes of the people who have very obviously poured months of their lives into this frigid march. Moments not of wild abandon (that comes later) but of deep concentration, quiet contemplation, that convince you that, for whatever reason, these folks care very, very deeply about the show they're about to put on for throngs of hair-of-the-doggers.

Sure, those routines might revolve around hillbillies or Clown Town, or "The Mums of La Mancha" (actual title). And there are still glib routines that depict American Indians and other cultures with stereotypical abandon. It's a parade with a history that's not completely unproblematic, but that's Philadelphia.

My Maryland-born girlfriend, making her own first in-earnest parade appearance, brought her camera and, mesmerized, snapped some 93 shots on the short walk from Tasker to the Washington Avenue staging area. Photos of a pensive mayor of Clown Town and its weird, violin-playing nurse. The natives pretending to row their canoe in the American Indian show(sheesh). The orange-faced Spaniards in Mums of La Mancha. Hillbilly mummers. Transformer mummers. Zombie mummers.

Maybe it was the hangover, or the cold air freezing my brain, but as we crossed an intersection and dodged a silly string war, I turned to my girlfriend and said, "I don't know how to tell you this ... but I think I want to be a Mummer."

(bhoward@citypaper.net)