SOUTH PHILADELPHIA. Preventing the New Year’s Day Mummers parade from going the same route as the Columbus Day parade — into oblivion — needed some help from outside the city.
Enter the Bacon Brothers.
Michael Bacon and kid brother Kevin were in South Philadelphia on Thursday pledging their help by throwing a benefit concert Dec. 5 in hopes of raising the thousands that the Mummers Association needs to go ahead with the annual parade up South Broad Street.
“There should always be Mummers,” Kevin Bacon said at Paradiso restaurant on Passyunk Avenue.
“It’s such a common part of Philly,” Michael Bacon said, estimating they hoped to help out in raising what he estimated might be $500,000 to pay for the parade and prizes. “Our father took us down there every year … all six kids.”
The two both reminisced about growing up in Philadelphia. Kevin Bacon said he spent the first 17 years of his life here living with his father, famed city planner Edmund Bacon.
“I never realized until I came back a few years ago. I was shooting [“The Woodsmen”]. I walked the streets,” Kevin Bacon said. “You go around a corner and you just think back on some experience and remember don’t remember specifically but know you have some connection to the place.”
Mummers Association chairman George Badey said afterward that prizes alone from last Janurary and this upcoming New Year cost more than $600,000. Other costs associated with running a six-hour parade have yet to be determined, Badey said.
But with the help of the famous musical duo, Badey guaranteed the parade will march on this year.
“The problem is being solved,” he said. “The parade will go on.”
