One and the Same Read Online Free Page B

materialized in a Chinese costume to belt out “Chong”). When I played Velma in a college production of
Chicago
, Robin made a brief appearance as my character’s dead sister. We danced a duet to the song “I Can’t Do It Alone.”
    We used to embrace collaboration. In college, Robin wrote the lyrics to a musical I directed. When I choreographed
Anything Goes
, Robin was one of my front-row dancers. We cowrote a song for the commencement musical and sang duets on cabaret nights. But I was actually the first one to back off from the sister act. It became clear tome that some people chafed at the Pogrebin Show. There is something redundant about performing twins. Being identical is already a performance—you’re drawing attention to yourself before you open your mouth. To dance and sing is kind of milking the point; it left us open to eye rolls.
    I learned in college that some saw Robin and me as too brash, too visible, too
much
. I’ll always recall freshman year, when a junior who’d known me in high school had a “heart-to-heart” talk with me in the courtyard of my dorm. He suggested that my sister and I were too audacious, said we’d “taken over” the theater community and he resented it.
    I was stung; it plagued me that we might be viewed as puffed-up. I told Robin we had to fix the perception, modulate ourselves somehow. Her response was, essentially,
screw them
. She has never cared what people think the way I do, and I’m sure it has saved her hours of torment. But I learned in that moment that our twinship can be intrinsically showy, even before we set foot on a literal stage.
    â€œThere were bumps in the road,” my father recalls when I interview him, “but I think the twinship was like a golden thing. You were used to a world that adored you from the beginning. That might make it tougher later in life when everyone is not so adoring.”
    As the line dancing gathers steam (along with progressively loosened participants), I notice a pair of women who stand out, not easy to do in this crowd. They’re dressed in pink sequined cowgirl hats and hot-pink tank tops that say I’M THE REAL MCCOY . People seem to recognize them—they’re quickly surrounded, hugged, kissed, and photographed.
    I’d heard about the Ganz twins—several people I’d called during my early research had asked, “Have you met the Ganz twins yet?” In Twinsland, it turns out, these sisters are legendary. Self-dubbed “ambassadors of twins,” they run a twins talent agency out of New York. In the 1990s, they founded and operated Twins Restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where all the waiters were twinsand Debbie and Lisa Ganz were usually on hand to greet patrons. I introduce myself (it turns out they know my brother from the restaurant business), and they chastise me for not booking myself at the Holiday Inn, “where everyone stays.”
    â€œWe come every summer,” Debbie exults over a fitting song, “‘Same Time Next Year.’”
    Lisa chimes in: “The great thing about it is, you could be coming here for twelve years, and you might know everything about the twin part of people’s lives, but I wouldn’t know if they live in a trailer park or a mansion. In Twinsburg, you can literally have two politicians sitting next to two pig farmers next to the prince of Saudi Arabia twins, and they’re all having a blast. Now in normal society, outside of this weekend, they wouldn’t be together. In Twinsburg, it’s our
identity
that’s actually in common. Not our demographics or our careers … I know twins that I’ve been spending weekends with for twelve years and I still, to this day, don’t know how many kids they have, don’t know if they’re married. But I can tell you everything about the two of them together.”
    Debbie adds, “I also think that