“So if he gets hurt, do you feel it?”“Can you guys, like, read each others thoughts?”
"What’s it like having the same face as someone else?”
No, only once during a game of pictionary (it blew peoples’ minds), and I don’t have his face, he has mine thank you very much.
As a twin, I’m often asked these sorts of questions (a bit of twin etiquette: these questions are seen as being amazingly gauche. Please don’t ask them unless you are prepared for eye-rolling and a generally well-deserved amount of disdain). This is due to the fact that the public is just fascinated with twins. I don’t quite understand why. Besides looking similar, the only special things we can do are patch up failed marriages through adorable hi-jinks and cause complications during murder investigations with our identical DNA. Booooring.
If you want interesting, albeit often more tragic stories about twins, look to the conjoined twins. Take the Hilton Sisters for example. From the first days of their birth (101 years ago as of tomorrow), they were forced into the sideshow circuit and vaudeville acts to live their life on stage as a public spectacle. Besides a narrative of exploitation (sadly a common theme in the lives of conjoined twins), their stories confront issues of identity and differentiation no average twin could even imagine.
But then again, twins are old news, conjoined or otherwise. Now we have Jon and Kate Plus 8 (twins and a group of sextuplets) not to mention a brand new batch of octuplets for the public to gawk at. Oh, the questions they will be asked.
No, only once during a game of pictionary (it blew peoples’ minds), and I don’t have his face, he has mine thank you very much.
As a twin, I’m often asked these sorts of questions (a bit of twin etiquette: these questions are seen as being amazingly gauche. Please don’t ask them unless you are prepared for eye-rolling and a generally well-deserved amount of disdain). This is due to the fact that the public is just fascinated with twins. I don’t quite understand why. Besides looking similar, the only special things we can do are patch up failed marriages through adorable hi-jinks and cause complications during murder investigations with our identical DNA. Booooring.
If you want interesting, albeit often more tragic stories about twins, look to the conjoined twins. Take the Hilton Sisters for example. From the first days of their birth (101 years ago as of tomorrow), they were forced into the sideshow circuit and vaudeville acts to live their life on stage as a public spectacle. Besides a narrative of exploitation (sadly a common theme in the lives of conjoined twins), their stories confront issues of identity and differentiation no average twin could even imagine.
But then again, twins are old news, conjoined or otherwise. Now we have Jon and Kate Plus 8 (twins and a group of sextuplets) not to mention a brand new batch of octuplets for the public to gawk at. Oh, the questions they will be asked.
posted by jw
