On New Year’s Day, 2019, Candace and I caught an early SEPTA train from Trenton to Philadelphia and walked to City Hall where Candace had bought tickets for us to view the Mummers Parade in “grand stand” seats - wooden bleachers!
It was a great view of the parade, just opposite the reviewing stand and the TV cameras. A slight downside was we got better views of the back sides than the front sides!
We got to our seats a bit after nine and stayed until 2 when we left, checked into a hotel, and then found a sports bar where we could watch the Rose Bowl - Candace is a big OSU fan. While we were waiting for the Rose Bowl, we watched the rest of the parade on TV.
Until 1 pm there were “wench brigades” and “comic brigades.” These seem to involve costumes (cross dressing!!!) and “strutting” which seems to be moving a parasol up and down and jumping around to music in time to a band. A typical group was preceded by a school bus (or several) (I think to carry the group home afterwards), and a band, often in a flat bed truck that sometimes parked in front of us. Then came the mummers themselves, often with floats, and often with confetti or smoke machines. Sometimes they’d throw things into the crowd, like beads.
The groups paraded down Market Street to City Hall, turned right at the reviewing stand to go around City Hall, then went south on Broad Street.
At 1 pm came the string bands, with elaborate performances including portable sets. We stayed for about four of these and got to see a lot of the mechanics of the sets. We left, not because we didn’t like them, but because our butts were sore and we were hungry! While watching on TV we noticed that the sets were designed so none of the mechanics were visible to the TV cameras.
Candace wanted a video of one of the bands as the left. It is linked here.
Most of the photos below, contain no captions, because I had no idea what to write! Sorry about that.
Clicking on a photo below brings up a larger version. You can also activate a slide show.