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This morning I woke up excited. You see, I’ve always loved big parades, and, to me, the best acts of any parade are the marching bands. Forget floats. Forget balloons. You just can’t top the sound of a tight band of more than 50 musicians coming down the street right toward you. It’s magic.

But there isn’t a parade today. That’s tomorrow (if it doesn’t rain), when the Mummers rule Broad Street, and “2 Street” after that. No, today I was excited because I had gotten an invitation to hang out with the Polish American String Band while they performed their last rehearsal before the big event. And so I drove with my wife Zoë from our house in Fishtown way, way down to South Philly, passing the Eagles’ stadium with its parking lot bristling with trucks, campers and green-clad tailgaitors partying before today’s huge game.

The practice was held in an empty parking lot almost directly under I-95. Well, not really empty. As soon as we parked the car a bit down the street, I could hear the band firing up. Sure enough, about thirty band members in red club jackets were playing in a circle. They didn’t even have their full percussion section, but it was still an awesome sound and I couldn’t stop myself from tapping my foot and nodding my head along with the music. It sounded a lot like this:

After listening to the band for a few minutes, band member Jim Werner took us on a tour of the warehouse where the props for the parade were being assembled. This year’s theme is “What a Rush”–as in California Goldrush. Their artists and builders (marshalls in Mummer terms) built massive 15-foot-tall glittering paper mache boulders on wheels along with elaborate airbrushed backdrops. Built into the boulders are sticks of “TNT” that will shoot incredible explosions of confetti into the air. The mechanical innards look like something that ought to be a top-secret military project. Can I push the confetti button? Can I? Can I?

I spoke with artist and Hinge Cafe owner T. DeLuca who designed and built the paper mache boulders and other props, along with her cafe partner Simone. Along with a free demonstration of her crushing handshake, she informed me that the boulders are made of chicken wire, paper towels (better than newspaper, T. says), burlap, muslin and a coat of paint. T. bought so many rolls of paper towels–25 8-packs–that she had to hit several stores to buy enough. It was months of work and about 25 men were working furiously in the warehouse to get everything assembled and complete.

On the way back to the rehearsal site, Jim pointed out Al Debuono, whose crew of 20 workers created the elaborate costumes worn by the band for the parade. Al shrugs at my look of amazement at the amount of work his group his completes for the Polish band. For Al, it’s all in a year’s work. He’s in demand, assembling costumes for ten of the Mummers clubs. And of course, the costumes had to be designed from scratch all the way back in April by another artisan, Russ Fama. We’re talking drawings like you see on Project Runway. Mummers don’t mess around when it comes to costumes. But I don’t get to see the costumes. That will have to wait for parade day.

And then there’s the choreography. I talk with Dana Theil of the Pennsport School of Dance, who spent weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks training ten regular guys to dance like Charlie Chaplin with glittery pickaxes. Did I mention that four of these macho guys will be dressed like girls? They’re Clementines. I looked at Jim and asked, “what the heck is a Clementine?” He responded by singing a few bars from “Oh my darling Clementine”. Duh. Check these guys out. I’d say Dana did a good job (Jim is the skinny one in jeans) :

The boys dance hard, play hard, march hard. And they should: The Mummers parade is a serious competition, with each of the bands competing for top honors. The Polish American String Band has a long legacy of winning: eleven first-place finishes, and fourteen second place finishes. But they haven’t won the big prize since 1990. Jim looks at the ground when he tells me this. Based on my little glimpse of Mummery, I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of trying. It’s hard to believe that a band this good is an underdog.

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I learned a lot about Mummers in just a few short hours, way more than I can convey in even this long blog post. But if you read this far, I want to share just one more thing about Mummers, and that’s the idea of tradition and community. It was impossible to miss. The Polish band is nearly 75 years old, the mummer’s parade more than 100. The band’s captain Mark Danielewicz, a young man you’ll see leading the group in the parade, has been leading the band for the past five years. His father, Ray, captained the band for seventeen years before that. Ray’s father captained the band before that.

And then there’s Bernice Hagenbuch. When she arrived at the rehearsal with a pink scarf around her head it seemed like half the band stopped what they were doing to hug her. She kept saying “no kisses.” After a while, she sat down next to me on the back of a flatbed truck (after her husband carefully put a towel down for her). Bernice explained to me that she’s not allowed to kiss because her immune system is weak from six months of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. But she was glowing, really glowing. Beautiful. I asked her how many children, grandchildren and other relatives she had in the club, and she started to tick them off, thinking hard. A family member helped out. The total came to at least 15.

Bernice can’t join the Polish band because it’s all men. But here she is anyway, a Mummer through and through.

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Special thanks to Zoë Lukas, who took these photos and videos. Thanks also to Jim Werner who gave me the insider tour and a chance to be in the Mummers parade, blogging along.