When Tracey was a young girl she used to dream about performing at The Muster with the crowd going off. But then me, kids and a lack of doing anything to help bring that dream about happened and she gave up on that dream.
Well, she gave up too soon!
My dreams at The Muster usually focus around whatever crappy car I’m driving managing to get out there and back. This was tested again this year when we arrived and steam was coming out from under the bonnet and then a friend locked our keys in the car.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told them when they looked to be working themselves up about it. I don’t stress about this stuff anymore. Life’s too short. “This sort of thing always happens to me. We’ll either get it unlocked or we’ll call RACQ. It’s easy fixed.”
The most important thing was, the Gympie Music Muster was on and WE WERE THERE!
Well, not all of us. The kids were all being looked after by my long suffering (she had them for 12 hours) mother while we snuck off to sell programs to earn our way in. We were very excited about being childless. Unfortunately, though, there wasn’t much call for programs on the final day of four day event which meant we had our first interruption and distraction free chat in, probably, years and I was able to grab myself a celebratory nap, which went off splendidly.
The Muster is the stuff of legend around these parts. Every year, on the last weekend in August, a big piece of the Amamoor Creek State Forest Park is filled up with country music lovers and beer and the place goes off. We’ve been volunteering our time for over ten years even though I’m not a huge country music fan.
But while I don’t class myself as a country music fan I love an instrument played well.
Which is my clever segue into bringing up my clever, clever wife ending up on stage playing a banjo ukulele with about 25 people in the Special Surprise featured Presentation, as it was catchily referred to on the program.
So how long has my wife been playing the banjo ukulele? They handed it to her as she walked out. Yep, she’s that talented.
What happened to bring this momentous achievement to fruition was our excellent friends, Luke and Karen, went to a ukulele workshop while we were selling programs.
We’re about to have a ukulele lesson. Followed shortly afterwards by, I’m rubbish at it. And a short time later, So rubbish that I’m performing at 5 on the main stage!
I looked in one of the programs I wasn’t selling. I messaged him back:
Program says surprise presentation. I would have thought they meant a good surprise. Is it a comedy routine?
Luke assured me the teachers were going to carry them and all he had to do was play a D – which required one finger.
Which was enough for Tracey to want in.
“Do you think they’ve got room for one more?” she wanted to know. Luke thought they might, given the difficulty they had getting volunteers at his workshop. I guess novice ukulele players are a shy bunch.
Not only did they have room, they gave Tracey the banjo ukulele, which she assures me is a much more difficult mini instrument to (pretend to) play.
So not only did we have a childless few hours to nap, chat, listen to great music and drink James Squire, Tracey also got to perform on the Muster Mainstage, which has been a dream of hers since she was a young Gympie girl.
Tick that off the Bucket List, Tracey, and let’s start working on getting a new car.
Here’s the first half of their debut performance 🙂 You might catch a glimpse of me standing in the crowd filming. I’m the idiot holding his camera the wrong way so we have to watch it on our laptops with our heads tilted on our shoulders.
This is not a sponsored post. We just had a great time and wanted to tell the world 🙂
When not typing away over here and checking his stats every two minutes Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his ‘BIG FAMILY little income’ Facebook Page.
’raising a family on little more than laughs’
