Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
messages such as “Double Trouble,” “Born Together,” “Look out, there’s two of me,” “Clones,” “I’m the evil twin,” “It must have been my evil twin,” and the classic “I’m with stupid.” Adult T-shirts also reflect relational themes such as “Friends Forever,” “It’s a twin thing / you wouldn’t understand,” and “I’m smiling because you’re my sister / and I’m laughing because there is nothing you can do about it.” A carnivalesque sense of high humor and a sense of challenging, bending, or breaking singleton norms and rules predominate. Twins can even replicate their replicate selves, with each twin wearing a photo button of their twin pair in the same place on their bodies. All this can get confusing, which is exactly the point. Jeana and Dina told us how the photographers coached them on how to look alike for their button pictures. They went through (and paid for) many takes before they got a photograph that suited them both.
The effect of twins festivals is well depicted as “uncanny.” Ironically, one’s sense of being unique and special as a pair of twins is both enhanced and muted as one is surrounded by twins by the dozens. Some festival twins develop expressive self styling or personae that make them stand out among the thousands of sets of twins that surround them. At Twinsburg Dorothy, Kristi, and I began referring to sets of high-profile twins (those who stood out) with identifying labels like the Fabio twins, the Parrot twins, the Harley twins, the Kings, the Playgirl and Playboy twins, the Cowgirl twins (in Western outfits) and the Cow girl twins (in cow suits), the Doctor twins, and the twins on The Simpsons. Talking with ITA twins who had also attended the Twinsburg festival, we found other sets of twins had come up with the same labels. Some twins dress like a famous celebrity. At Twinsburg, twin sisters dressed like Dolly Parton. In their case, my own sense of reality was suspended. Initially, I thought they were over-the-top, rural southern throwbacks to the 1950s, but Dorothy and Kristi convinced me they were in costume.
Although the websites and promotional materials for Twinsburg note that it is not necessary to dress alike, attendees are advised that most twins get into the festival spirit by dressing alike. Jenna and Steph, identical twins in their early forties (who do not look much alike and regard themselves as “complete opposites”), told us that they had arrived for their first time at Twinsburg with no similar clothes. They felt like pariahs on the first day because they felt that no one would talk to them. On day two, they bought identical festival T-shirts and said they fit in then, entering conversations and making friends with other twins. Deciding to dress in similar clothes but in different colors, Dorothy and I also felt like outsiders among the mass of pairs at Twinsburg. We had the impression that our decision to wear essentially the same clothes but in different colors (as our mother often had dressed us in later childhood) was a cop-out. Having different hairstyles and hair color (dyed) also marked us as not in the spirit of the festival. At Twinsburg we were constantly advised that identical baseball caps would be a simple and quick fix to the hair problem.
The appeal of dressing alike and participating in contests, however, can become strangely addictive, as Dina and Jeana explain.
Dina: I planned this whole vacation. Jeana had no idea. I told her we were in the parade. It was fun. I like this whole twin fest thing because we’ve learned so much. Next year I want to come back in costumes like other people were doing and throw out candy. During the parade it was funny because I like waving to people; it’s like I’m saying, “Thank you for supporting us twins.”
Jeana: We’re going to have to plan next year. We’ve learned and lived through this one. Next year will be even better. What we’ve found interesting is how much we desire to look alike now, whereas before it was like, well, OK, we look similar. We went to a restaurant where the waiter said, “I would never have guessed you were twins.” I mean that, like, hurt. In high school we tried so hard not to look alike. Now we want to look alike.
After their first time at Twins Days, Jeana and Dina planned to dedicate more planning and effort to dressing exactly alike for the festival. They have become socialized by the festival experience to dress alike “with attitude” for Twins Days. Three years after we first met them, Pete and Emil sent me an article from their local newspaper that announced they had finally won the look-alike award for their age category at Twinsburg. They were also proud to have finally won, at age eighty, recognition for being the third-oldest twins at Twins Days in 2004. Annette and Arnette are two middle-aged women who describe themselves as “Twins Days regulars.” They have attended the festival for eight consecutive years. When they competed in their first festival look-alike contest, Arnette was over sixty pounds heavier than Annette. After the first festival, Arnette was inspired to lose the extra weight so they would look more alike for future contests. Twins who attend twins festivals are enthusiastic performers of an envisioned twin persona. At festivals, twins become the norm as look-alike twins of all ages dominate the peoplescape. By performing identical or sameness, twins place themselves at odds with Western society’s notions of independence, autonomy, and individuality. This becomes clear when we take into account the views of the media and singletons.
Outsider’s View: An Audience of Singletons
Because twins dominate the peoplescape in Twinsburg, they provide a dramatic twinscape for outsiders who attend the festival. Outsiders are singletons who include researchers, reporters, spouses, siblings, parents, children, friends of twins, service or sales personnel, and the general public who watch the parades and contests. Reporters, feature writers, filmmakers, and photographers from all over the world descend on the Twins Days Festival. Outsiders’ views of festival twins can be ambivalent. Festivals are designed to shock and unsettle and, as public events (Handelman 1990), twins festivals give primacy to sensory visual codes. If a pair of twins can be described as “dramatically visible” and a “fascinating condition of humanity” (Wright 1997, 110), then what effect does the sight of thousands of pairs of twins have? Wright’s (1997) depiction of identical twins as an unsettling presence in the world well captures the singleton, outsider’s experience of twins festivals. Our research assistant, Kristi Cody (2004, 14), felt visually assaulted by the sight of so many twins. Kristi reports that she was “totally freaked” by Twins Days and claims, “It was like entering an episode of the X Files.” Journalist Tony Barrell (2003, 22) writes of Twins Days that the casual observer “is at risk of flipping out when they see all these human carbon copies.” Like Barrell, reporters have a field day with word play as they describe the impacts of seeing so many twins together. Their prose is peppered by references to “seeing double,” “double vision,” “double trouble,” “double the interest,” “two heads are better than one,” “freaks with four legs,” “queues of twos,” “doppelgangers,” “seeing double without the penalty of a hangover,” and so forth.
Seeing thousands of twins is a kind of assault on the senses and conflicts with the idea that one’s face should reflect one’s distinctiveness, or personal identity. Twins in this sense are weird and scary to the outsider, if not threatening or even dangerous. But the unsettling effect grows with the age of the twins. The anthropological literature on twins indicates that identical twins lose any of their culturally elaborated distinctiveness after childhood (Dorothy Davis 1971; Stewart 2003). Yet at Twinsburg, over 30 percent of twins registered for the festival are over twenty-one years old (Miller 2003). As Kristi told us, “The little kids are really cute, but for adults it’s kind of sick. They [identical adults] need to get a life.” Likewise, Bacon (2005) notes that while identically dressed babies are seen as a delight, identically dressed adults are not. In our society identically dressed adults will be stigmatized. Piontelli (2008, 219) has this to say about adult female twins who continue to dress alike.
Although doppelganger behavior elicits the attention of passers-by, it makes adults appear freakish or pathetic, just like the fading stars in “Sunset Boulevard” who try uselessly to hang on to their withered glory.
For singletons it appears that the face is a sort of label for a distinctiveness that lies within. If identical twins complement their like faces with identical outfits, the singleton observer suspects that the self may somehow be divided, diluted, or duplicated. If personal identities can be conflated, the self, especially at adulthood, is therefore impaired.
At festivals, as twins revel in dressing alike and surrender themselves to the pair, there is certainly a sense