Tickets selling fast for fashion show benefiting  Seniors’ Centre expansion

By Zachary Roman

The first 300 tickets available for the Spring Fling Fashion Show sold out quickly.

Being held in support of the Caledon Seniors' Centre expansion, the fashion show will take place at the Royal Ambassador Event Centre in Caledon East on May 26.

Doors open at 6 p.m., dinner is served at seven and models hit the runway at eight.

Roxanne Deabreu-Mountain is the owner of It's Roxies in Caledon East, one of the clothing stores responsible for styling the show. Lisa Embrett is the owner of Gals n Britches in Bolton, the other store involved. Anna Altobelli-Murray is the fundraising coordinator at the Caledon Seniors' Centre. Together, these three women organized the Spring Fling Fashion Show.

When the first 300 tickets they offered sold out, the three fashion show organizers talked to Royal Ambassador staff and arranged to increase capacity, enabling 100 more tickets to be sold.

As of April 7, tickets were still available for purchase at It's Roxies in Caledon East, the Caledon Seniors' Centre or Gals n Britches in Bolton.

Tickets are $85 per person and a table of 10 can be purchased for $850. Dinner at the event is included with ticket purchase. 

Jessica Sole, a country artist from Shelburne, will be performing at the event and Deabreu-Mountain is incredibly excited for her involvement.

“She was recorded in Nashville last week,” explained Deabreu-Mountain in an April 5 interview. “I was so honoured that she said yes to me. She came into my store and I know who she is and I asked her… she's really good.”

There will also be a silent auction at the fashion show, which Altobelli-Murray said has some amazing prizes. It's another way for the organizers to raise money and try to reach their $15,000 to $20,000 goal for the evening.

“The most important thing is that we're doing it for the Caledon Seniors' Centre, all the proceeds go to the Caledon Seniors' Centre,” said Altobelli-Murray. “We're having fun in the meantime… having fun for a good cause.”

Altobelli-Murray said the Seniors' Centre was built in 1995 and hasn't grown in size to keep up with Caledon's tremendous population growth.

“People are moving here from the city and we're getting a lot of 55-plus,” she said. “To sustain that in the future, we need to expand and that's why we're expanding.”

The Town of Caledon has committed to paying for the brick-and-mortar construction costs of the expansion, explained Altobelli-Murray, adding it was great the Town made the commitment. As fundraising coordinator, Altobelli-Murray is raising funds to furnish the inside of the seniors' centre, which will need everything from kitchen equipment to couches to flooring.

“We raised over $100,000 in the last year but we need to raise a lot more to get to what we need,” she said. “Our budget was $600,000, so now we're at $500,000 (left to raise)…everything that we do is just going to chip away at that.”

Altobelli-Murray said this in-person fundraiser will be the first of many to come and she's hoping to make the fashion show an annual event.