STRINGS

I never liked New Year’s much or understood the desire for craziness at midnight but after coming to live in Philadelphia, I slowly got involved in the traditions of the Mummers and their amazing New Year’s parade.

I began watching way down on Broad Street when I lived deep in South Philly and graduated to Broad and Christian with my neighbors and their children when I moved to ‘northern South Philly’.  I swore I would never watch a parade uptown.

But, in time, I began going to the popular bars around 13^th and Pine Streets and I knew and enjoyed lot of people so one year I slowly gave in and watched from the corner of Broad and Pine.  It was tremendous fun.  Our friend Billy would yearly climb the light pole and just as annually be hauled away by the police.

I had a very old blue duffle coat that looked like a blanket that I saved just for that day.  I carried a large plumber’s bag that Rose Fantasia had sewn my initials into.  It was filled with extra socks, scarves and mittens to use and share with anybody who needed them.

My goal every year was to escape the street barriers and the police and dance in the middle of the street with a String Band Captain.  I was usually successful in this endeavor.

We ‘liberated’ men’s rooms at the local pizza parlor.  The men’s room lines were always so short compared to the women’s room ones.  My sweetest, shyest friend Mary Ann helped me the first year. I was terrified, especially when I heard Mary Ann outside the men’s room door that I was behind, staving off, sweetly, a man wanting to come in. 

After I moved to New York, I heard that the parade had fallen on hard times for a few years.  The last time I saw it, it was a straggly little group, marching along Market Street, not Broad, and it made me sad.

I hadn’t thought much about the Mummers in a long while but on the way down to Philadelphia for New Year’s Eve with friends, they came to mind.  The Parade was revived and back on Broad Street again.  I wondered if any of my friends from ‘before’ would still come out?  Would anyone I knew come by Dirty Frank’s Bar or would I just feel sorry that I had ventured to the area again?  I was scared; sometimes these ‘going-back’ things really don’t work.

I walked slowly past 13^th and Pine seeing only lots of young mummer clowns with bright green faces hanging out the door of the old bar.  How many times I’d had paint on my face from mummer kisses!

I carried on slowly towards Broad Street.  The pizza shop with the bathrooms was right across the street.  I wondered if our tradition had been carried on?  In front of me walked a tall man with a gray ponytail under a wonderful hat set at a rakish angle.  Joe?  --- Could it be Joe?  Yes.  The artist, Joe Tiberino welcomed me royally, as did the people with him including Gail and his beautiful daughter, Ellen.  And, the parade itself was delightful.  The audience, new and old, was as thrilled as I had always been.  Joe encouraged me to go back and enter the bar and push past the clowns.  He said I might see some old friends.  Sweet familiar faces welcomed me, some looking very much the same.  It was like a painting, a beautiful painting with different people popping in.

I didn’t stay long, just long enough to hug and remember; to collect some addresses and say that today I didn’t want to hear the long litany of who had died.  Over the years I had heard but not today.

Today was a New Year and a day for memories, a time to make plans for moving forward and a day for honoring a past time of great fun.  My whole few days back in Philadelphia had felt soft.  I walked the streets of my old neighborhood and sat on the stoop of my former building; I had good conversations.  It was a time of wisps, soft clouds, touches; vows to be in touch more, a time of gratefulness for the past and hope for the future.

Happy New Year everybody.  Mary Pat Kane