THIS correspondent will realise a long held ambition this year.
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We'll appear on the stage at the Manning Entertainment Centre. Yes, the MEC, the epicentre of all things cultural in the Manning Valley and probably beyond.
The fact that we've yearned to be on stage at the MEC would probably surprise the regular reader of this piece. For it is no great secret that we were fierce in our opposition to the building of the structure back in the 1980s, as were many others, we might add.
"Council should be spending money on our roads,'' we screamed.
"Not wasting it on the cultural elite. This is just another example of our Taree-centric council.''
Actually, we probably didn't say that given roads weren't something we were all that concerned about back in the 1980s. And we wouldn't have even known what 'Taree-centric' meant back then.
However, we did huff that the money would be better used to build us a proper footy ground. Nearly 30 years later and we're saying the same thing ... the more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes.
And to be fair we haven't been a regular patron at the MEC since it opened in 1988. Four times, we think, we've wandered through the front door, although once was when we were a tad confused and thought it was the touch footy canteen. It had been a ferocious game of touch footy played on a hot day, so obviously we were disorientated from the exertion.
The other occasions were for the Greater Taree Sporting Hall of Fame inauguration in 2000. A few years and one wife later the then centre manager, the affable Mike Collins gave us a couple of tickets to see a play, the name of which we've long forgotten while we turned up there last January after covering the Crowdy Head triathlon with photographer Scott Calvin for the Oz Day awards.
That's not to say we've been totally absent from the stage, given we've co-hosted Group Three league season launches and presentations with Food Martin at the Wingham Services Club for the past few years.
But our desire to be on MEC stage has been somewhat dormant.
All will change in 2015.
Now over the years many have called us a philistine. We resented this, arguing that we are Australian born and have never been to Philistine in our life and that we have no intention in getting involved in Middle East politics anyway.
Then it was explained that we were getting mixed up between being a philistine and Palestine, which we guess is easy enough to do.
Those who accused us of being a philistine obviously didn't see our performance as a tree in a play when we were in fourth class. Rave reviews we received from mum, who forecast that we'd eventually carve out a successful career in show business although she was worried that we could be type cast in roles relating to flora.
We can reveal that our next foray onto the stage has nothing to do with trees.
And we will have a speaking role (unlike back in fourth class, when all we had to do was shake our arms, pretending they were branches. Method acting, we think it's called.)
We're already starting to get a touch nervous, although we're led to believe from veterans of countless performances that this is a good thing.
We just hope we don't get stage fright. Lights, camera, action.