68° and Sunny
Mother Nature provided excellent weather for Saline Ladies Night Out on Thursday night. Ladies started out at Workout 1 and proceeded to visit various participating businesses where they found free gifts and discounts on food and merchandise.
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, many businesses provided items consistent with this theme. For example, Maureen White-Goeman of Maureen’s Designs prepared “Mammo-grahams,” graham cracker cookies representing a mammogram. Saline Optometry offered fresh strawberries dipped in a pink chocolate fountain.
Saline Main Street raffled a basket of local merchandise worth about $500 at Workout 1. The proceeds were designated to help a local family battling cancer.
White-Goeman also held a silent auction for a quilt donated by Renee Davidson. This money was to go to breast cancer research.
Saline restaurants offered drink specials. The “surprise specials” at Dan’s Tavern included caramel pumpkin martinis and caramel apple sangria. Mac’s offered cosmopolitans, shrimp cocktails with chocolate-covered strawberries and Bellinis. A free order of mussels came with a drink purchase.
At Salt Springs Brewery, discounts were offered for raspberry sangria, pints of beer and glasses of wine. Mangiamo Italian Grill also had sangria and discounts on appetizers and cannolis.
Smoke BBQ provided free samples of pulled pork and pulled rib sliders. The Pineapple House offered free wine slushies. Maureen’s Designs gave away corsages.
Besides the regular downtown venders, various other sellers set up tables at Workout 1 and a few other places. Sarah Gray, a Mary Kay sales director, was at Carrigan Café “to pamper women, especially cancer survivors.”
The ladies seemed to enjoy the opportunity to spend the evening with girlfriends and to “shop, sip, savor and support”. Also, many had good things to say about the food and beverage offerings.
Vendors like Karen Hodgson of Cobblestone Rose and Joy Ely of Pineapple House were enthusiastic about the number of women who visited their stores. For some others, the business was slower than they had hoped.
“I was making orchid corsages as fast as I could to keep up with the number of visitors,” White-Goeman of Maureen’s Designs said.
She also said, however, that the effort was exhausting and that these special evenings are a net financial loss for most merchants. The ladies were not spending a lot of money and the “philanthropy didn’t work” she said. She was disappointed that there were no serious bids in the silent auction for a quilt for cancer research.
Ladies Night Out is held by Saline Main Street twice each year, once in the spring and once in the fall. The next event will be March 29, 2016, just before the Michigan Avenue renovation begins.
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