Twin fair

This picture is why I love writing memoir. 

The truth is always quirkier and stranger than fiction.

When we were kids, me and my twin sister entered a twin fair contest at the Pomona fair. It might have happened more than once. It was not by choice. 

You had to be twins, you had to dress alike and you had to have a talent. All twin contestants were judged on how much they looked alike as twins. And we were pretty similar. As far as talent, we did not the play piano. So I think we were pretending for the camera. 

As an aside, I did play the clarinet for one school year then gave it up. I'd always wanted to play drums or guitar, like Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days, not blow into a reed instrument.

I don't remember the details of that twin fair day, one forever memorialized in a newspaper clipping my mom still has. I'm the twin on the right who's closest to the frame. 

There's a mesmerizing glint in my eye. I'm sure I was planning my revenge in my head against my mom for making us show up in those head caps. 

As a kid, I was always telling myself stories in my head. Now you know why. For surely, it was to escape the doom and outright creepiness of my Inland Empire world. 

Then again, maybe I've just always been a ham. Side of pineapple please. And a coffee, a cig and a lighter to burn this picture up. 

Or maybe, just maybe, I love it all. The picture, the way we look like demented prairie girls pretending to play a (toy?) organ. 

It's truth. It's weird. It's life.