Erica von Kessler.
Now there's a name.
Voracious readers of pop culture will know her well from page 112 of Michelle Phillips' autobiography California Dreamin.
Michelle was the pretty thin one in the Mamas and the Papas who didn't always sing in tune.
I was at high school beginning a music-writing career with a feature on the group for Groove, the national pop magazine.
I found an address in an American magazine, sent them a raft of probing questions, and Erica von Kessler replied.
She lived in the same house as Michelle, a friend since childhood, and told me she did their mail when she could be bothered.
She answered all my questions and asked if I could possibly keep writing to her so we could become friends.
In case I might incomprehensibly refuse this request, she sent me some gifts and a photo.
The gifts included an album by her boyfriend.
He is going to be famous, she said, he is ahead of his time.
It was Richard Pryor.
And her photo was a measurably more beautiful sight than eight of the previous10 Miss Swedens.
Do you have a photo, she asked coyly, I would love to see what you look like.
As I was 16, stick-thin, horrifically-haired and bespectacle-ugly, I was compelled to claim I was out of photos, but would get some taken soon.
I insufferably flashed Erica's glossy pic around my close personal friends and told them how she was an aspiring actress in Los Angeles who rilly liked me.
I told them I may pop across in the holidays and, you know, maybe do some stuff.
She was 23.
Then Erica started sending me marijuana.
Just one flattened joint each time, but marijuana nevertheless.
The mid-'60s in Dunedin was a time when possessing marijuana was sort of beyond crime, they just fired you straight into Cherry Farm Mental Hospital for serious medical fixing up.
My dad's friends came round so they could look at the marijuana and touch it - they were all Playboy magazine readers, and Playboy was moving from nipples to narcotics in campaigning to legalise the drug.
They asked if they could buy some, maybe just snip a quarter-inch off.
I said no.
I wasn't a pedlar.
Occasionally, Erica asked for a photo, and occasionally I said I would try and remember to send one next time, I was just one of those guys who couldn't remember things.
I may also have told her I was 23.
She lived in Laurel Canyon with all the rock stars, and casually tossed off wonderful anecdotes, like how the Monkees would play Beatles records backwards to try and work out how they did what they did.
She wrote for a few more years, but the gaps between letters grew longer.
I stuck her photo in a book for safe-keeping and lost the book.
Then she said she was off to Europe to make a movie and wouldn't be able to write for a while.
That was 1969 and I haven't heard from her since.
I guess a woman can wait only so long for a photo before she decides you are pond slime just like all the other men.
Three weeks ago, I looked Erica von Kessler up on Google.
Two movies.
One, a 1970 porn romp called The Pleasure Game, has neither rating nor information on the Internet Movie Database, and even though I searched high and low, mostly low, through the world's porn video sites, I couldn't source a copy anywhere.
But I do know she was called Shirley.
However last Saturday, her other one arrived, Blume In Love, a quite good Paul Mazursky film from 1973.
Erica was girl at a party, and voracious seekers of pop culture will find her 71min 46sec in.
She is on screen for 38 seconds, delivering, somewhat desperately, a bewildering drugged-out drone to an equally-bewildered George Segal.
In the world of retrospective teenage starstruckdom, we call this closure.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
