LAST EDITED ON Jul-02-08 AT 04:01 PM (EDT)
 
Remember in Reunion 6 when Mylene proposed a G3 Jam-style live tour to reintroduce Minmay to a whole new audience?

Well...

... a couple of years later, they did just that.

Artwork by Phil, of course!

I like to think this one was taken during their all-stops-out duet on the old Queen song "I Want It All":

It ain't much I'm askin'
I heard her say
Gotta find me a future
Move out of my way

I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
And I want it now

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Awesome. I love how Minmei has a RDF/WDF tattoo on her arm :)

_____________________________________________
"Walls are meant to be broken." - makes sense both figuratively and literally.

That kicks ass!

Beautiful timing, too, I'd just finished rereading the Sterling Sisters' Saga maybe a couple weeks ago.

Incidentally, about Lynn Minmay. Was she always a counterculture punkish type in UF, or did she used to be a saccharine pop singer before Sonset? Or was she in one of the earlier stories and I forgot? I admit I don't recall seeing her.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard

LAST EDITED ON Jul-02-08 AT 05:55 PM (EDT)
 
>Incidentally, about Lynn Minmay. Was she always a counterculture
>punkish type in UF, or did she used to be a saccharine pop singer
>before Sonset?

Minmay has one of those curiously convergent origins that happen sometimes to people in the UF universe. The fictional version (actually, the second fictional version, the vaguely Americanized one from Robotech) is mentioned as a fictional character in the original UF, but, as it transpires, she also existed as an actual person in the UF universe at the same time. The former is widely forgotten by the characters themselves, probably as a side effect of the Crossroads reality fault, and shouldn't be looked at too closely.

With that out of the way, Lin Minmei (or Min-mei, if you want to be all Giles-Wade about it) was a student at one of WPI's neighbors, Clark University, in 1991. As something of a performing arts wonk, she was familiar with some WPI students through its drama and music programs and used the Worcester Consortium system to take a few classes there. Since most of the WPI drama geeks of the time were also Wedge rats, it could be argued that the outcome was inevitable: Unable to be arsed (or possibly to afford) to return to her native Taiwan for the Christmas holidays, she ended up being part of the group that escaped the obliteration of Worcester and became the founding members of the WDF.

Initially uninterested in the spacetrotting defender of justice lifestyle, she was among those Worcester refugees to be returned covertly to Earth. She has a unique place in history as the only person ever to ask to be retrieved by the WDF after that return, for reasons she does not care to discuss.

Although her musical taste ran toward the idol pop end of the spectrum, that didn't last long after her return to space; by the turn of the 21st century, she'd discovered her true calling as a messenger of the rock 'n roll gods. After abandoning her pop career, she dropped out of sight for a little while, reappearing briefly as a backup guitarist with Card No. 1 before establishing her own band. Taking an Anglicized stage name (without bothering to reverse the order of her names, at that, which is why friends call her Min rather than Lynn), she embarked on a meteoric second career in 2001 as the leader of one of the SDF-17's hardest-rocking bands, Lynn Minmay and the M-Deck Marauders.

(I should perhaps pause here to note that M deck was the level aboard the SDF-17 where most of the founders lived. In time the "M-Deck" part was changed to "Macross", when Minmay moved to Macross City, and in time any qualifier was dropped from the band's official name altogether, as with, e.g., the "Delaware" in George Thorogood & the Delaware Destroyers. Also, the WDF's multi-winning gravityball team was also called the M-Deck Marauders, and Minmay and team captain Kei Morgan carried on a joking feud in the press for decades over who stole the name from whom.)

The Marauders were a galactic phenomenon, one of the SDF-17's "Big Four" rock bands of the Golden Age (along with Card No. 1, the Clay Pigeons, and Def Leppard). If Card No. 1 were the WDF's Beatles, the Leps their Stones, and Pigeons frontman Martin Rose their Al Yankovic, the Marauders were the Who (doubly so when Pete Townshend played lead guitar). Among other achievements, their direct, straightforward, hard-rockin' good-time music all but shattered the monolithic, militaristic, unimaginative pseudoculture of the Zentraedi during their brief war with the WDF, awakening their entire race to the truths inherent in musical self-expression. Not for nothing is the flagship of the Zentraedi officer most directly involved in the contact, Breetai Kridanik, called the Minmay Marauder.

Like so many other WDF institutions, Minmay and the Marauders were hit hard by the fall of the WDF and the subsequent smear campaign. The group disbanded, its members scattering; not all survived. Guitarist Jack McKinney eventually joined Mylene Flare's backup band, but of Minmay herself, nothing was heard for decades. Under assumed names, deliberately concealing much of her talent and nearly all her encyclopedic experience of rock, she reinvented herself as a harmless vanilla pop/folk singer-songwriter, played a series of dives on the Outer Rim and the Coreward Frontier, and generally tried not to be noticed during the Exile - a hard day's dollar when your entire livelihood involves standing out from the crowd. It took Mylene and her bandmates, each pursuing a separate line of inquiry, nearly a month to track her down, and convincing her to come out of obscurity to join the band on stage for the Zeta Cygni concert was no mean feat of diplomacy on Mylene's part.

But, as you can see, it paid off.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>> "the Marauders were the Who (doubly so when Pete Townshend played lead guitar)."

Speaking of convergent, the mental image and audio of UF Minmay singing "Won't Get Fooled Again" works really well, especially with Townshend's windmill bit and Minmay giving "that scream" :)

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

>Guitarist
>Jack McKinney eventually joined Mylene Flare's backup band, but of
>Minmay herself, nothing was heard for decades.

Nice art-imitates-life bit, since the guitarist bit was in "McKinney"'s bio in the Robotech novels. Of course, since he's not an actual person...

On that note...does anyone know who WERE the two people that made up Jack McKinney?

In any case, I like the bio. Very fitting.

>On that note...does anyone know who WERE the two people that made up
>Jack McKinney?

James Luceno and the late Brian Daley, if memory serves.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>On that note...does anyone know who WERE the two people that made up
>>Jack McKinney?
>
>James Luceno and the late Brian Daley, if memory serves.

Your memory serves correctly. Daley had previously made use of the name "Jack McKinny" in his first novel, reviving and respelling it as a pseudonym.

--The Evil Midnight Lurker what Lurks at Midnight
"An object at rest--CANNOT BE STOPPED!!!"

>
>Artwork by Phil, of course!
>
And as always, full of Win, Phil! Dang how both girls grew up tall proud and loud! Minmay had clearly filled out nicely, and not just as an artist...