I've been on TV once before. I'd just landed at Auckland Airport after a 40-hour bus ride from Thailand through to Singapore to catch an emergency flight home. I hadn't showered in three days when I was accosted by a TVNZ news crew who had been alerted to my plight by my own mother.
A vision of greasy hair, harem pants and filthy jandaled feet, I'd possibly never looked worse as I told the nation what it was like trying to escape Bangkok amid the political uprising that had erupted there while I was on holiday.
Today, bracing for my second-ever stint on television, as an extra on Shortland St, I'm hoping things will look a little different.
Arriving at the studio in West Auckland where the actors' entrance doubles as the exterior of the hospital, I register that 12-year-old me would have been beside herself to be walking through these doors. Not least because, as a 12-year-old, my Catholic school teacher, in telling the class no one was to watch Shortland St, made it infinitely more taboo to tune into every night at 7pm.
Today, being led through the huge warehouse, it's clear the set has been through some changes over the years. But seeing the reception desk brings back memories of Kirsty, Minnie, Waverly, Moira and Marjorie Brasch, that last name played by Elizabeth McRae, who uttered the show's very first line when she picked up a phone and said: "Shortland Street Accident and Emergency Centre" way back in 1992. It was the same episode that delivered the iconic "you're not in Guatemala now Dr Ropata" and the steamy tryst between Chris Warner and his gym instructor, Suzy Aitken. It could well have been the scene that sparked my teacher's moral despair over the show.
As I walk the studio's corridors, awash with photos of stars past and present, it's a reminder that this is the place from which many Kiwi actors - KJ Apa, Martin Henderson, Kimberly Crossman, Temuera Morrison – have gone on to find Hollywood success.
READ MORE: • Thirty years of Shortland Street: Five big success stories and where they are now
And it's the place some of our longest-standing TV talent still resides.
Preparing to be among some of New Zealand's most famous faces, I rehearse in my head greeting Chris Warner by his real name: Michael.
Michael. Michael. Michael.
When I do, in a moment of serendipity, pass him on the stairs, the drums from the show's original theme song beat in my ears.
"Hi Chris," I squeak.
I have some time in a makeup chair to regain my composure.
Chatting to the makeup artist, who shares she appeared on the show as a child, I get a sense of just how slick an operation Shortland St really is.
"It's a particularly busy day today but we've already done …" she quickly counts off a page stuck to a mirror "… 20 through hair and makeup this morning." It's 11am.
And it's not always pretty. Sometimes, the order is for gory, pustular wounds, burns made from a concoction of hot gelatin "that absolutely stinks" or, recently, a stick impaled in someone's abdomen.
I recall my blistered, dirty feet from my previous piece to camera and feel grateful I haven't been assigned any of the above for my cameo as an "FE". "Fancy Extra?" I ask. "Featured Extra," I'm told.
My husband, who has also done a stint on the street, says in his experience hair and makeup is not the norm for an extra. "Is it you or is it me?" I ask him.
From my quick sprucing it's a shirt-change and a hushed ushering onto the set where I will make my Shortland Street debut: in a scene in the hospital's café. I recall the very first character to run the place, one Gina Rossi, played by Josephine Davison, who passed the tongs onto John Leigh, of Lionel and Kirsty Beauty and the Beast, love triangle fame. Today it's another extra who tells me between takes that her son has also had a role on the Street.
A woman named Sammy directs me to stand at one end of the café's food cabinets, make my way to the till to order a coffee - by miming and gesturing – find myself interrupted by a call and scurry off to the side to mouth "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb" into the switched-off phone.
It must be immediately apparent that I have no idea what I'm doing because Ben Barrington - playing Drew McCaskill in the scene with his on-screen family - asks what my deal is. He'd seen me trailing the publicist earlier and likely caught my Chris Warner gaffe too.
I confess that I'm actually from the Herald, sent to find out what it's really like to be on the Street. From here on he's very kind and helpful, checking a camera at one point to see if I do need to keep rhubarbing in the background.
The scene also features Harper Whitely, Barrington's on-screen wife played by Ria Vandervis, and their three children, including Billy, the show's first intersex character. The seemingly quick segment requires several runs as the little ones are brought in. At one point, during what seems to be a good take, one of the kids shouts, "Wait, I haven't said my line yet."
"Cut!"
"Kids and animals, eh?" I quip to Barrington as if I've been in the biz for years. I remember immediately he already knows my secret.
The scene, despite its added challenges (me and the kids), is wrapped before lunchtime.
Before I depart to pen my account of bumbling through a background part on Shorty, almost leaving still dressed in part of the costume department's undergarments, I'm shown through the rest of "the hospital".
Watching as crew wheel walls around to create different ward spaces, they reveal a hospital bed in a corner and various clinic apparatus. They serve as a reminder of cast members past who have taken their final Shorty Street breath here. Among them are Chris Warner's wives, Tiffany (Alison James) who fell off a high rise building, and later Toni (Laura Hill), who suffered a cardiac arrest from dodgy drugs. Then there was the death of Sarah Potts (Amanda Billing) whose tragic end after contracting a superbug spurred almost a national outpouring of grief, and nurse Carmen Roberts ((Theresa Healey), who dropped dead from a brain haemorrhage after a truck crashed through the clinic one Christmas.
But as Shortland Street clocks up 30 years of deaths, births, sordid affairs, murder mysteries and wild revenge plots, it's also become a barometer for the state of New Zealand society, reflecting issues such as gay rights, abortion laws, domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse.
And as I cringe at the thought of seeing myself on screen - while noting it undoubtedly will trump my first TV moment - I know, ultimately it's a Kiwi honour to be able to say you've been part of this iconic show.
