Ms. O’Hara, originally of County Dublin in Ireland, is a celebrated film actress of an earlier era. Odds are strong — no, overwhelming — that you have seen her in one of her best-known roles, that of Doris Walker, the woman who runs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the classic 1947 version of “Miracle on 34th Street.”
Ms. Kule, originally of County Nassau on Long Island, is not quite as well known. But she is a real-life Doris Walker. She is the parade’s executive producer.
It was “awe-inspiring” to have met the actress, she said over a long dinner in TriBeCa recently. In 1997, Ms. Kule had been at Macy’s for a year, and life as a parade maestro was not yet on her radar. Ms. O’Hara, now 93, showed up that year at the flagship store in Herald Square for an event tied to the 50th anniversary of “Miracle.”
Years later, Ms. Kule, 48, came to appreciate how good the celluloid Doris Walker had it.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have that same life, because she made it home to her Upper West Side apartment while the parade was still going on,” she said. “I thought when I got this job that I would actually get that apartment. I will tell you I’ve never had the luxury of watching the parade outside a window, or inside, as long as I’ve been part of it.”
Rain or shine, wind or snow, it is Ms. Kule’s lot to lead the parade from its start on Central Park West to its finish in Herald Square. Not that she is complaining. Far from it. How do you beat a gig that puts you in charge of, in her words, “the last piece of vaudeville that’s left in America”?
Crackerjack investigative reporting — we looked at a calendar and saw it was November — led to inviting Ms. Kule to a meal for a free-floating conversation that alighted on topics like the nature of parades, the engineering complexities of inflating a balloon shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants and what her Thanksgiving Day is like after Santa Claus brings her event to a close.
She booked a table at Marc Forgione, on Reade Street, a restaurant that she described as “one of my go-to places.” Her own neighborhood — she lives on Seventh Avenue, steps from a building in the 30s where Macy’s has executive offices — is not exactly rich in grand dining choices.
Ms. Kule and her interviewer were treated well. She started with scallops, he with a kampachi tartare. They shared chicken under a brick, a portion so ample that it produced a “Breaking Bread” first: a doggie bag.
In between courses, the kitchen maintained a flow of bite-size freebies, like bluefish rillettes with cucumber slices, beets and Honeycrisp apples, butternut squash ravioli. Dessert, at her suggestion, was a dish of s’mores that they also shared — toasted marshmallows, graham cracker and all. Together, they did justice to a bottle of red Sancerre.
Though she grew up not far from Manhattan, in Wantagh on Long Island, Ms. Kule never went to the Macy’s parade when she was a girl. “It never even occurred to me,” she said. Her Thanksgiving morning routine was to hide out in her parents’ bedroom, watching the show on their television and joining the family downstairs only when her father called out, “Santa Claus is here.”
“The parade was my great Thanksgiving avoidance in the kitchen,” she said. “My mother, to this day, thinks that I took this job so I don’t have to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And she may be right.”
“I always eat out” on the holiday, Ms. Kule said. Typically, the real Doris Walker’s work is done at around 2 p.m. Then it is back to her apartment to “pass out on the sofa.” Dinner is sometimes a last-minute thought. “I haven’t had a traditional Thanksgiving in 17 years,” she said.
What is it about parades, in general, that appeal to so many people?
“They’re celebratory, and they bring together things that are just unassuming, that are light, that are fun,” Ms. Kule said. “You don’t have to participate, so you don’t have to be fearful. It’s not like going to a dance, where you’re going to be called out. You’re not going to a comedy show, where you may in fact be embarrassed or be pulled up on stage unexpectedly. There’s something there for everybody to identify with.”
For sure, she added, that is true of the Macy’s extravaganza, which she described, not unreasonably, as “America’s parade.”
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