TWO Horsham teenagers are on a mission to bring American talk show host Ellen DeGeneres to Horsham when she tours Australia in March.
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Lucy Schmidt and Olivia Morris, both 14, began the online campaign a week ago after learning DeGeneres’ wife Portia de Rossi was born in Horsham.
“If she is coming to Australia, we think she’d want to visit Horsham as well,” Lucy said.
The girls used Twitter and Facebook to spread the word.
“We started tweeting, using the hashtag: ‘ellentohorsham’ and it started a trend,” she said.
“Ellen uses Twitter a lot so we hope to get her attention.
“We then started putting up posters around town, hoping more people will get involved.”
The girls are now working with Ben Plunkett from Plungers Editing Studio in Horsham to expand their campaign.
“We made a Facebook page ‘Ellen to Horsham’ on Wednesday night and it now has more than 400 likes,” Mr Plunkett said yesterday.
He hopes DeGeneres wants to come and see where her wife was born.
He will also help the girls produce a video to send to her.
“We want to get important people in Horsham, such as the mayor, to appear in the video,” Lucy said. “People seem really interested in what we are doing.”
She said Horsham people could join the campaign by liking and sharing the Facebook page and by using the ‘ellentohorsham’ hashtag on Twitter.
“Hopefully we’ll get her to Horsham,” she said.
Portia de Rossi was born Amanda Lee Rogers on January 31, 1973, at Wimmera Base Hospital in Horsham.
Her 40th birthday is on Thursday.
She married DeGeneres in California in August, 2008, during a period when a ban on same-sex marriage was overturned in the state.