When I graduated from high school, I went to the record store and bought several posters that I liked. I’m hazy now what they all were of but I know I had the famous picture of Hitler admiring the first VW “bug” & a fantasy poster of a beautiful, long blond haired, delicate-featured young woman kneeling under a tree, a vision of enchantment. I brought it because when I was 14, I dreamed about the girl I was going to marry who looked like that. I took the posters to college with me to adorn my dorm room.
One day in the school’s Student Union building, I saw a stunning real version of the woman in the poster and made her my wife and the mother of our children, Gwynne. As miraculous as that was, I gave away the posters to my best friend, Steve, when I got married and moved away. I figured maybe he’d be able to repeat my luck? Unfortunately, Steve died young, and the poster was lost.
Several decades later after I told my kids about their mom’s doppelgänger from the poster, and I tried to find a copy of it online to show them, but I couldn’t find it. Over the years I’ve searched literally hundreds of times for it to no avail. Worse, I couldn’t quite remember what the poster looked like, and after all that fruitless searching, began to think the whole thing might have been a remembered dream; why else would something like that be so difficult to find on the modern internet? Along came the first artificial intelligence (A.I.) that anyone could use, ChatGPT, so I asked it, “Find the 1970s fantasy painting of a woman kneeling in front of a tree.” ChatGPT responded, “I cannot search for images,” and gave me directions on how to search myself. I wasn’t impressed by A.I., and gave up again. However, the other day I was searching for something using Bing and I noticed it had an A.I. I thought I’d try that one, and asked the same question. It paused for a moment then, bang, the image of the exact poster popped up, titled “Stella.” I recognized it immediately; it was better than I remembered, and it DID look like Gwynne at that age (18)!
Better yet, it was painted by one of my favorite artists, Peruvian Boris Vallejo, which made sense, and the reason I couldn’t find it with all my previous searching was because the copyright holder, presumably whoever printed the poster in 1975, doesn’t allow its reproduction in digital form. I showed the image to Gwynne, who marveled I’d found it after all this time, and sent it to my kids who agreed it looked like their mom. Is there anyone else who married the girl of their dreams?
p.s. In 2024, exactly 50 years after the first picture of Gwynne, I randomly took a picture of her in Canyonlands National Park in Utah; afterwards I noticed it should be included in the series.
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