A NEW GROUP of Mummers comes along only once in a sequined blue moon.
The last new string band to venture up the street debuted eight years ago. There hasn't been a new Fancy Division "mother club" since 1960.
This year, there are two new outfits: the Pennsport String Band, whose home base is a room above a bar in South Philly, and the Adelphia New Year's Association, a Fancy Division mother club operating out of a guy's garage in Wilmington, Del.
Daily News reporter Becky Batcha dropped in on both as they made their frenzied final preparations for Tuesday's big parade to ask, in a nutshell: What on earth were you thinking?
Here, their stories:
The Boomer Mummers
The baby-boom generation has put a new spin on everything in its path, from politics, sex and pop music to, more recently, the botulism toxin. And this New Year's Day, with the scheduled debut of the Pennsport String Band, the boomers are remaking Mummery.
The baby-boom generation has put a new spin on everything in its path, from politics, sex and pop music to, more recently, the botulism toxin. And this New Year's Day, with the scheduled debut of the Pennsport String Band, the boomers are remaking Mummery.Subversively, Pennsport has no captain. No clubhouse. No year-round slog of paid gigs, like weddings and summer parades, to finance extravagances like the $2,000 costumes (that's $2,000 apiece) and the tens of thousands of dollars in props that have become the status quo for the Mummers Parade.
What it's got is about four dozen mostly middle-aged musicians, including seven women, who want to uphold the tradition of strutting up Broad Street on New Year's Day - and then just go home for most of 2008.
"Everyone is mostly over 40," said Rob Simiriglio, one of the band's four founders. "We don't have the time or don't want to take the time away from our families. We said, 'Why don't we start around Thanksgiving and give it a shot?' It's been a crash course in Mummery since then."
Like baby boomers' 401(k)s, the boomer Mummers are self-financed. The Pennsport organization has collected $325 in dues from each musician and from its affiliated dancers, for a total of not quite $20,000 - about a fifth of what's held to be the going rate to send a string band up Broad Street.
Like boomers' careers, the boomer string band aims to achieve a work-life balance - a strut-life balance, if you will - that puts family first.
