Jamine Miller When She Sang With Fantasy

I shot these in February 1970 for use on an album by a local rock group, Fantasy, who had just signed with Liberty Records. The cover featured a fanciful painting by one of the group, Billie Robins. Incorporated into the image were little stark black and white photos of the four members. I shot the photos with strongly directional lighting against a black background, and then printed them so as to eliminate any trace of middle tones. These photos of Jamine hadn't yet been reduced to just black and white.

Fantasy came out with two albums. One song, Stoned Cowboy, was a big hit. The group eventually broke up, everybody going their seperate ways. A few months ago I was reading the Miami Herald and there was a sizeable obituary for Jamine. She was 55 and died in Tampa from drugs. I found out that she never liked performing live but had appeared on dozens of records by about every major rock group there was. Put her in the studio and she was in her glory! She also wrote and arranged music for a lot of the major rock groups.

In these 1970 photos she was either fifteen years old or perhaps had just turned sixteen. The camera was my trusty old Minolta Autocord. The scans were off the original contact sheets, hence the dust spots. We miss you, Jamine.

The Ball And Chain

Not much has really changed since I shot this photo. The fan died and I got a new one. Instead of facing west into the glare of the late afternoon sun I now face east and look at a wall with a few framed pictures on it. I still make the effort to post a photo every night and write a bit about it. That's "the ball and chain part". I wore out one little fan and bought a desk lamp.

When I got dragged kicking and screaming into the blogosphere (isn't that what they call it?), very much against my best judgement, I figured that it would go on for a few months at best. At this rate I'll be crossing the "one thousand posts" mark before Christmas. It's fun and it keeps me out of trouble. Now I have to catch up and write something about Police Chief Jm Devaney. I didn't write it the other night!

What Might Have Been

Life is full of "ships passing in the night" as the old saying goes. Missed opportunities. Opportunities that we wished had really been opportunities, but for one reason or another the timing just wasn't right. I met Brenda on line at a time when she was caught up in the death throws of a dying marriage. Everything looked promising but at the time she couldn't bring herself to take that leap of faith to what might have been been a more fulfilling life.

In the meantime I got involved again with a woman out of my past, but I was being scammed, as it turned out. For that woman I made a great fantasy, I suppose, but the reality wasn't to be. I wasted a year and a half of my life waiting for the move that didn't happen. While I was believing the old flame about the life we'd share together Brenda finally divorced her husband. A free woman at last, and here I thought that I was spoken for.

Today, for the first time in ages, Brenda IM'd me. She's getting married next weekend. She wanted to tell me the good news. She didn't sound like the excited bride to be...not at all.