Four Philadelphia numbers:
About 582,000 women 18 and older live here.
More than 12,000 people participate on the street and behind the scenes in the Mummers Parade.
Conservative estimates are that 2,500 residents consider themselves visual artists.
And a last estimate that about 250 men and women work as martial arts teachers.
And then there is the singular Cathy Hopkins, the one person who fits into all of these categories:
Woman, artist, karate teacher, Mummers' sculptor.
Hopkins, 53, also is an art teacher and a mother, but let's put that aside for the moment.
Because she doesn't have a lot of time. "This is Mummer season," Hopkins says.
The parade is one day, but the work is all year. And from September on, Mummers are worker-bee busy as they gather in garages, gymnasiums, clubhouses and piers to rehearse and build props and floats for New Year's Day.
But it's not just the Mummers who are busy. Winning first prize now often means hiring professionals to help. So designers draw pictures of costumes and props and floats, and artists help many clubs create them. Choreographers rehearse dance steps with longshoremen and electricians once a week beginning in September, twice a week in November and December. Painters and airbrush artists are waiting to begin.
"Thank God for the Mummers," says Thora Jacobson, director of the Fleisher Art Memorial. "I applaud anyone who will hire artists."
Last year, 15 string band and fancy brigade clubs hired Hopkins, who created motorcycles, elephants, sphinxes and a flying devil for the New Year's Day performance - all out of foam.
Four of those clubs were the winning and second-place fancy brigade and string band.
She's created sculpture in materials from bronze to polyester resin, on display from Hong Kong to the Steel Pier. But, for the Mummers, Hopkins is the foam queen.
You stuff pillows with it, and she makes objets d'art.
She's Kansas-straw blond. Slim, friendly, not chatty. Bryn Mawr graduate. Smokes Merits.
Lives in South Philadelphia on Sixth Street near Federal, the rowhouse with the karate trophies and sculpture inside. Foam pieces cover her third-floor studio floor like paint splatters. Sometimes, when she's done with a piece, instead of carrying it down, she'll toss it from the third-floor deck to her yard below. You can do that with foam.
She grew up in Morristown, N.J., and came to Bryn Mawr in 1965.
