The Mummers Parade is an American event held each New Year's Day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is thought to be the oldest folk festival in the United States.
Local clubs (usually called "New Years Associations") compete in one of four categories (comics, fancies, string bands and fancy brigades). They prepare elaborate costumes and moveable scenery, which take months to complete. This is done in clubhouses – many of which are located on or near 2nd Street (called "Two Street" by some local residents) in the Pennsport neighborhood of the city's South Philadelphia section – which also serve as social gathering places for members.
The parade is televised on WPHL-TV; after a national campaign to get the parade nationally televised, an edited two-hour broadcast of the parade was picked up by WGN America and WGN-TV; the broadcast debuted January 3, 2009.
Read more about Mummers Parade: History, Location, Time and Route, Two Street, Blackened Faces
Famous quotes containing the words mummers and/or parade:
“What cared Duke Ercole, that bid
His mummers to the market-place,
What th’ onion-sellers thought or did
So that his Plautus set the pace
For the Italian comedies?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in “the social” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)