I spent all yesterday watching men in sequins dancing around on the street. I went to Pennsylvania to visit people for New Year’s, and apparently in Pennsylvania (at least around Philly) one watches the Mummers Parade on TV for all of January 1st. It was a very, very strange thing.
A Mummer. Banjos are sort of a thing.
It was also a beautiful thing. Well, I mean, sometimes it was a pretty hideous thing – I think the mummers get judged on the amount of different colors in their costume, and so sometimes this made the costumes wonderfully ridiculous and elaborate, but some clubs just kind of looked like someone ate a ton of Skittles and glitter and then vomited everywhere. Even the skittle vomit costumes, though, were still super impressive.
The longest part of the parade was for the fancy brigade: the string bands (like a marching band but with banjos and impressive people marching with string basses and far too many saxophones), who performed elaborate field-show-meets-Broadway-production in the street in the cold. This year’s shows involved dragon heads, people dressed in entire bear costumes, babies, and more feathers and sequins than I have ever seen in my life. The whole thing was reminiscent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, except with more glitter and less inhibition.
Different sites give different accounts of the origins of the parade, but the gist of it is that the parade started with traditions from Irish, northern European, and Scandinavian immigrants living in PA. The first government-funded parade was in 1901. The tradition apparently had something to do with going door-to-door and singing on the days after feasts (notably Christmas and New Year’s Eve) and begging for leftover food. In England, this type of practice evolved into the tradition of caroling. In Philadelphia, it evolved into this: 
Mummer captains. The feather fan thing is a theme.
The Mummers Parade was definitely interesting, anthropologically. All of the captains of the fancy [“fancy” here meaning “dipped in sequins”] brigades were interviewed, and it was very strange to hear the lucid and quite normal-seeming 30somethings talk about practicing their entire year to bedeck themselves in glitter and awesomeness in front of the entire city. As a kid from a small town who has been trained (blame my dad) to view cities as community-less miasmas of disconnected worker drones, the enormous display of ritual, excess, and fellowship (albeit bizarre fellowship) was surprising and heartening. Also, as a Northerner accustomed to self-consciousness and grumpiness and cold (one of my friends from Kansas said that he assumed everyone in New York State wore only black) the extravagance complete disregard for any semblance of subtlety was refreshing. Events like the Mummers Parade reveal important things about humans in general, I think: our relative insanity and our love of the sense of community we get from practicing insanity together. So good job, Philadelphia.
The longest part of the parade was for the fancy brigade: the string bands (like a marching band but with banjos and impressive people marching with string basses and far too many saxophones), who performed elaborate field-show-meets-Broadway-production in the street in the cold. This year’s shows involved dragon heads, people dressed in entire bear costumes, babies, and more feathers and sequins than I have ever seen in my life. The whole thing was reminiscent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, except with more glitter and less inhibition.
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