Oprah sends Burlington teacher to Australia

Oprah Winfrey is giving a Burlington elementary school teacher will get the anniversary trip of a lifetime.

Nada Smith was in the studio on Sept. 9 when the talk-show queen announced that she was taking 300 audience members — Smith included — to Australia for a special taping in December.

The surprise, which featured John Travolta appearing in a pilot’s uniform and a plane rolling across the stage, was the first episode in Winfrey’s final season helming her hit talk show.

“It was surreal,” said the 39-year-old Smith. Making it even more dreamlike: the fact that she and her sister Annemarie Hood, who accompanied her to the taping, had to leave right away for their flight home to Toronto and couldn’t tell anybody.

“I was just busting,” said Smith, a Winfrey fan for 25 years. “It was really hard to keep the secret.”

All audience members, including Smith, were at the taping because they had won a summer contest as an “ultimate viewer” of the Oprah show.

Smith, married with two children, won in part because of a video she’d entered in a 2007 contest, where viewers were asked to convince Oprah to tape her show in their hometown.

Smith didn’t just stop with film of Chinatown and Greektown. She enlisted the help of people at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was allowed to do red-carpet interviews with stars Angelina Jolie, Josh Brolin and Don Cheadle and ask them why Winfrey should tape in Toronto. For the record, Smith, who didn’t win that contest, says Jolie said the people were nice and Brolin offered to send Oprah directions.

Smith will take her husband Lee, 44, with her on the 10-day Australian vacation, which begins Dec. 5.