Do you remember the dark-haired lady with a sparkly headdress and the fire-breathing dragon?
Lady Luck Casino’s $4 million dragon spectacle — called the Asian Dragon of Good Fortune — lit up the night sky in East Biloxi for more than four years in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The casino merged with then Isle of Capri and closed in 1998, but was known for its dragon that “breathes fire, roars, glows in the dark, swims into the lagoon, breaks into the temple,” according to a Sun Herald story from 2017 .
The other mascot for Lady Luck was a woman in a black dress who threw cards and poker chips. She was said to give good fortune to gamblers who chose to play there.
And while Lady Luck Casino was short lived on Casino Row, an Ocean Springs native now living in Texas found a piece of forgotten history over the weekend and had to buy it — and she may keep it for herself or give it to someone special.
Natalie Bialota, who lived in Ocean Springs from 2007-2019, was shopping at a vintage store in Texas when she found a Lady Luck Biloxi Beach T-shirt.
She bought it for $19 from the Leopard Lounge in the Montrose area of Houston.
“I decided to buy it because I figured either it was a sign for me or maybe someone back home would appreciate it,” she told the Sun Herald on Monday. “I didn’t live on the Coast when Lady Luck was there, but I know a lot of people have fond memories of it.
“I’m one of those people who keeps little things of sentimental value (to a fault, really) so I thought, maybe, I could give someone that joy. If I let it go, I’d really like it to go to someone who it would be of some kind of sentimental value.”
The 30th anniversary of casinos on the Mississippi Coast is August 1, 2022.
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