YOU HAVE TO "GET" THE MUMMERS to get Philadelphia. I don't mean you have to "like" the Mummers or "enjoy" the Mummers or even "approve" of the Mummers. You just have to understand the reason why there's a Mummers Parade in Philadelphia every New Year's Day rather than in any other city on earth. The Mummers are like a magic act you've seen a thousand times and yet you can't explain the trick. It's a sleight of hand with both hands in plain sight . There is no artful deception; the crafty illusion of the Mummers Parade lies in its utter sincerity. You couldn't make this stuff up. And if someone tried it would come off as falsely fanciful and make believe as a Disney or a Six Flags or a Starbucks on Two Street.
Philadelphia's Mummers Parade isn't an ancient solstice festival or a defiant ethnic rite of celebration or a tourist-friendly civic marketing opportunity so much as this city's historically predictable obsessive compulsive disorder. Mummers. Where did these guys come from? The centuries of fat and lean years have changed their traditional chant, "Give us whiskey, give us gin, give us Broad Street, let us in. Give us millions or if not, we'll strut and dance for free nonstop." If the NFL Players Association operated like the Mummers, the Superbowl would be aired on public television. Like the internet, nobody has discovered how to make money on the Mummers. The days of local TV stations offering million dollar contracts to air the parade are long gone.
Think of it. In the year 2010 the Mummers had to pay $150,000 to march in the city of Philadelphia on New Year's Day. We all know why; the recession, police overtime, yadda-yadda-yadda. We all know that the "prize money" awarded by the city to the winning clubs over the years has been a gesture compared to the actual financial cost, both to the individual and the organization, of being a Mummer. Well, boo-freakin'-hoo, Mr. and Mrs. Mummer (and as I write those words I think of a string band captain in Port Richmond decades ago named Richard, whose nickname was "Big Dick", which was printed on the back of his club jacket as he sat on a barstool in the clubhouse next to his wife, who wore a mummers' club jacket identifying her as "Mrs. Big Dick."). The Mummers have survived worse times than these -- world wars, the Great Depression, Wilson Goode -- and they continue to be "this thing of ours", Philadelphia's "la cosa nostra," a New Year's parade you can't refuse.
