Did you get enough food before the start of Lent?

Marywood held a Mardi Gras celebration from 9 p.m. until 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9 in the Latour Room of the Nazareth Student Center to make sure students got their fill of food before weeks of fasting.

The event featured jazz music from the Marywood Jazz Ensemble and New Orleans style food such as gumbo, crab cakes and cupcakes.

Mardi Gras, also known as Fat Tuesday, is the final day of indulgence before the somber season of Lent. Though first conceived in Europe around the end of the 17 century,  Mardi Gras has almost become synonymous with New Orleans. The southern city popularized the feast day in the 18 century, and still has events, parades, food and music to commemorate the feast day.

Marywood decided to bring some of the New Orleans flair up north.

Andrew Ansbrow, a junior architecture major and a SAC intern, helped plan the event. He wanted to have a cultural event to promote diversity, with an emphasis on the diversity within the United States and wanted to bring some “southern culture to Marywood.”

“In program planning, which happens about halfway through the semester before, we evaluate cultural diversity,” said Ansbrow. The purpose is to see if Marywood’s activities had an “appropriate amount of diversity in the previous semester,” according to Ansbrow.

Samantha Adams, a sophomore biology pre-med major and a SAC intern, also wanted more diversity at Marywood.

“We were trying to think of different holiday things to do, trying to bring more diversity on to campus, said Adams. “We thought, why not Mardi Gras?”

Esperanza Gutierrez contributed to this article.

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