Nobody's Gonna Rain on Her Parade

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Published: Dec 29, 2006

Kelly Mahon and Alexxa

Kelly Mahon remembers when the Mummers Parade ventured as far north up Broad Street as Girard Avenue. In those days, her parents would take her to a bar on Broad Street, where, from the front window, she could see the Mummers pass by.

But even though it was warm inside, Kelly wouldn’t stay put. “Every time a band marched by, I would run outside,” she recalls. “I would sit on the curb and wait for them to come up the street.”

Some of us outgrow our fondness for this uniquely Philadelphian spectacle of shiny satin, feather sprays and sparkling sequins. Not Kelly Mahon. “The minute I hear the first beat of the music, I just start dancing,” she says. “It’s in my bones. I love it.”

You can see how much this four-foot-eleven-inch red-headed dynamo loves the plinking of the banjos and the wheeze of the saxophones on New Year’s Day as she struts up Broad Street, leading the Irish American String Band as its captain. She’s been making that trek every year since 2001. She’s only the second woman to lead a string band. (The band's 2007 theme: Don't Rain on My Parade.")

Leading a band up Broad Street is the thrill of a lifetime for Mahon, a physical therapist’s assistant working in a Langhorne nursing home. “Back in the day,” as she puts it, the dream was off-limits to little girls. Mummery was an exclusively make preserve. The only “women” in the parade were men in drag.

Mahon had no problem with that. “I believed in the guys doing their thing,” she says. “I respected that. I thought it was an awesome tradition.” But over the years, she says, the string bands gradually lost members, and longtime bands started to fold.

“As a kid, I can remember 27 bands coming up Broad Street,” Mahon says. (In the 2007 parade, seventeen bands were scheduled to march.) So when bands started admitting women in the late 1980s, she figured, “I love Mummery, but now it’s time.”

Almost another decade would go by before Mahon would take the plunge herself. Mahon joined the nascent Irish American String Band in 1999. (It was formed in 1998.) “My brother had a pig roast party, and he had hired out Irish American,” Mahon says. He knew of his sister’s longtime passion for Mummery, and he asked them whether the band allowed women members. The answer was an unequivocal yes. “I got a phone call from the band that night,” she says. Not long after that, “I went to my first practice, and I haven’t looked back since.”

The Irish connection was also a powerful attraction. “There’d never been an Irish American band, not to my knowledge,” she says. “That’s what drew me to it. I said to myself, hey, I’m a potato head. I can do this.”

Initially, the band taught Mahon to play banjo. About a year later, the band was looking for a new captain. Mahon wrote a letter expressing interest to the band’s executive committee. She was passed over, but then when the committee’s first choice moved on, she applied again. This time, she got the job. It’s been hers ever since.

It’s easy to see why. With her silver sparkling uniform and headpiece, she spins from one side of the street to the other like a human tilt-a-whirl. Irish American might not have the long history and the overwhelming numbers of the more established bands, but they have passion in abundance—and it seems to start with the band’s diminutive powerhouse of a captain.

Don’t expect that enthusiasm to dry up any time soon. “I still get emotional every time I go out there,” she explains. “I’m living a dream.”