SHINE, GOOCH, SHINE
A little advice: screw New Year’s Eve this year and hit the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. For three hundred years on January 1, thousands of hairy longshoremen and firemen don feathers and sequins, grab their glockenspiels, and swarm up Broad Street blaring song. Mummers sweat their creative presentation all year long, trying to win first prize in their category. It’s competitive and largely handmade by the guys themselves, art meets blood sport lubricated nicely by brews.
The fastest growing category is also the oddest: wenches are guys who dress in colonial-era drag. Mikey “Gooch” Bryson heads wench club Bryson’s NYB with his father Joe. “My first suit was a nightgown,” Mikey hollers over his father’s sewing in his cellar in South Philly. “Half of it was purple, half yellow. My brother dyed it in the basin, like, Yeah, I’ll make you a suit. I thought it was the coolest thing going.” Mikey draws creative juice from the neighborhood: silver bags from the peanut factory, a planter used as first base in stickball. What’s it like to strut to City Hall in a dress? “You’re having fun, but when you get to the hall...you feel all powerful and jittery.” He shivers. “Now I’m in the mood.”
—Jude Stewart for ReadyMade, Winter 2004
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