Saturday, September 16, 2017

Hodgepodge 322/365 - Twins

This morning, before the wedding (that I guess I'm not going to write about... I've been to three weddings this year, and I was too busy simply enjoying being there to [a] take photos, which is something I like to adorn my posts here with, or [b] think about much more than, well, simply being there, in the moment, enjoying conversation with good friends, enjoying the couple's love and high spirits, enjoying the food, drink, and music... so yeah: I won't say anything about today's wedding except I'm so glad I was there to witness Brian and Melissa's love: it was a beautiful ceremony)...

Anyway, before the wedding, we had time to do a little (you guessed it, if you know me at all) geocaching! One of the caches was an ostensibly difficult (4.5 stars out of 5) "puzzle" called "The Twins." In the end, I'd rate it, oh, 2 stars difficulty (it was not hard, though you did need a partner), but 5 stars on the fun scale; and it wasn't a "puzzle" so much as a "multi." Here's a couple of pictures:



I mean, really: how often do you find a pair of angels guarding a simple torii-like gate in a cactus garden? Each angel-pillar had a box on the back, with a combination lock. Inside each box was an electronic gadget that we needed to press simultaneously—hence, twins. By doing so, we got coordinates to the final cache. Easy, really. Just not a park-and-grab.

But that got me thinking about twins: famous, infamous, fictitious, or otherwise. With scant research, I learned that actress Scarlett Johansson has a twin (Hunter), and of course there's Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, musician Alanis Morissette has a twin (Wade), Robin and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees were twins, George W. and Laura Bush's daughters Barbara and Jenna are twins... Et cetera. The above link lists many dozens of twin-sets as well as famous people with unfamous twins (95 percent of whom I have not heard of). And I also thought of Cathy and Patty Lane, of the Patty Duke Show—though as David pointed out, they were identical cousins, not twins.


The iconic twins for me are the ones from Rochelle, New Jersey, captured forever by Diane Arbus in 1967:


And of course Romulus and Remus:


But then David reminded me about the artist twins Doug and Mike Starn: the Starn Twins, as they go by. Photography is their base medium. We've seen their work various times and are always impressed. Lots of good, interesting, quixotic, large-scale (their pieces are wall-sized) energy. So here are a few images from their oeuvre.








The twins themselves + dog

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Bob's a twin. His brother is very different: he got the music gene while Bob got the math gene. When they were kids, he was the anti-Bob: boisterous and impulsive where Bob was studious and industrious, a ne'er-do-well where Bob was a mostly-do-well. I'd never heard of the Starns. Those giant photos are interesting!

Anne Canright said...

I wish there were a "like" button! Thanks for this.