Colour and Spirit

The seventh annual Mardi Gras Ball organised by the North American Women’s Association took place in the Oak Room of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, which is perhaps the best such event this year. Mardi Gras has a long standing tradition in New Orleans of street parades with masked riders on two and three tiered floats tossing fistfuls of beads, doubloons and painted coconuts and is not confined to a room. Nevertheless that carnival spirit pervaded the atmosphere and those present had themselves a great time.
Contributing towards the success of the event were the fanciful costumes the men and women decked themselves in. There were cave men and women, Cleopatras’, birds complete with masks of feathers and beak, and one particular woman even wore shoes in the form of clawed bird’s feet. There were boas and ostrich feathers which were worn on heads for bursts of colour. Sumita Radha had purple feathers Nishani Dahanayake wore a tomahawk headdress in black, white and red feathers with a sequined dress in the same colours in a design of diagonal stripes.
A black and copper outfit with a mask and a wisp of feathers was the sophisticated outfit Sandra Nathanielsz favoured. Among the men was a Bin Laden, and a tall Merlin the magician besides the hunks who shouldered the palanquin bearing princess Karen de Alwis the Chairman who was among the active members of the organising committee whose magnificent necklace was the focal point of her outfit. She as escorted by Dhiraj de Almeida.
There was non-stop music for dancing with vibrant sounds from the popular group Misty, cabarets and wine women and song to turn Mardi Gras into a fun filled unforgettable event, which everyone will look forward to with nostalgia till the next time comes around.
Among the team were the co-president’s Methsili Ehrlich and Dharshini Sumanasekera, more conventionally clad and also dressed in the same vein were Nalini Senanayake and Rohini Cooray. The DJ Dhanushka rolled the music into carnival time with master of ceremonies Gary Firth keeping the evening going with roaring success with the good times going into the early hours of the morning.