Monday, December 16, 2002

CHECK-A-CHING-CHING-CHING: And speaking of marching bands, today's Philadelphia Daily News contains a little bit of Mummers lore of which I was not previously aware: what happens when two string bands want the same theme?

There are those people who find Philadelphia's traditional New Years' Mummery distasteful, and now that I've lived near the Two Street Corridor and been woken on New Years' Day at 7am by the sounds of music blasted out of the back of a comic crew's beer truck (a Ryder van stacked to the top with cases of cans of cheap beer, including half-cans of Coors which were handed out -- again, at 7am -- to the 12-year-olds in the crew), and had drunk Mummers puking and peeing on my block at the end of the day (as well as saying distasteful things about my wife), well, I'm in the process of being converted to a staunch anti-Mummist position.

And it's still almost all-white. And they don't march on Broad Street anymore. But, still, what city has grown, blue-collar men spending their New Years Day dressed like this?

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