January 15, 2004

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STAFF Q&A/Laura Sprague explains what goes intoMummery for those of us who just don’t get it

“We order our feathers online from Ostrich.com.”

BY ELAINE WILNER

Sprague (lower right) sits in her kitchen, where she makes her family’s costumes, with her clan of Mummers (clockwise from bottom left): daughter Tracy, son Eric, daughter Jennifer and husband Tony, captain of the Cahill Fancy Brigade. LAURA SPRAGUE Position: Administrative Assistant, Microbiology Department Length of service: 9 years Other stuff: A part-time student at Penn, she wrote an anthology paper on the history of the Mummers. Photo by Candace diCarlo

There are people who love the Mummers. There are people who hate the Mummers. There are millions of people who live outside the Delaware Valley who have never heard of the Mummers. Then, there are people like me who have lived here for many years and just don’t “get” the Mummers. It is Philadelphia’s very own weird and wonderful institution.

I decided to go right to the source. Laura Sprague is the manager for the Cahill Fancy Brigade and her husband Tony is the captain. Her whole family is involved, so I asked her to be my guide. Call it Mummers 101.

Q. I’ve been living in the Philadelphia area for 23 years and I still don’t really understand how the Mummers operate. I understand that there are four divisions. How do they differentiate themselves?
A. There are comics, fancies, string bands and fancy brigades. The comics are the least organized. They are more the fun side—hence the name comics. They are mostly clowns or wenches. They do individual skits that are usually more timely.

Then there are the fancies. I am not real familiar with them, but they have more elaborate costumes. They are the ones where someone is standing in a circular suit with a big back.

The string bands are the most familiar Mummers. There are over 20 string bands. They perform on the street with props and do a certain dance or routine they call a drill.

The fancy brigades, if I’m not mistaken started out as part of the fancies, but because there were more people involved they became a brigade and broke off. The fancy brigades don’t make their own music like the string bands. It used to be that they had a live band with them that played on the side, but now we use canned music.

Q. How many people are in a brigade?
A. We had 33 this year. You have to have 30 marching members in order to qualify as a brigade.

Q. How and why did you get involved?
A. There are lots of people who don’t understand it. I grew up 30 miles from Philadelphia and I never watched the Mummers Parade. It was only after my husband and I met that I started to get interested. Even then, it was seven years before he finally took me to the parade. A couple of years later he became involved in Cahill—it was Cahill Comic Brigade then. He marched for two years then took a year off. By time he rejoined, it had become a Fancy Brigade and we both got involved. My oldest was 12 years old when he first marched.

Those of us who are Mummers are very passionate about it. Being able to continue the tradition is part of it. Our club in part is very family-oriented. We have a large late teen membership. We pass down the tradition of Mummery. That’s one of the reasons all four of my children march.

Q. Who makes all these wonderful costumes?
A. We build all the costumes in my kitchen. I have three to five sewing machines on my kitchen table at any one time. We killed a couple of sewing machines this year. We actually had a little corner of the kitchen that was our graveyard. We went through 10 different machines.

My husband sews and my daughters sew. I haven’t gotten my boys to learn. I have someone who doesn’t sew, but she likes to hot glue—so we save that work for her. There are others who only like to hand sew. They are in the living room and dining room.

Q. What about the feathers the Mummers are famous for?
A. We order our feathers online from Ostrich.com. Feathers are very expensive. We store them and re-use them. We can have them cleaned, but after a while they get a little tattered looking. We used 200 to 400 feathers on my husband’s costume this year.

Q. Each group has a theme. What was Cahill’s theme this year?
A. It was “Art.” In February we vote on what we want the theme to be for the year. It can be anything. This year is probably one of our most abstract. From there we elaborated on different styles of art. We had Degas’ ballerinas. We had stained glass windows. My husband was the artist. We had artists’ palettes as our back pieces. We had huge men wearing these huge suits standing in a picture frame that they pulled around and on the back were the ballerinas. When they turned around it was like she was stepping out of the picture. We used music from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Q. Is there intense competition between clubs?
A. Oh, yes! The bragging rights for the year if your club comes in first place are phenomenal!

Q. Can you give a sneak preview of next year’s theme?
A. Actually, even if I did know, I wouldn’t be able to give a hint. You don’t want anyone to steal your thunder.

Heather A. Davis contributed to this article.