I was anxious to get to London, not wanting to wait another moment to meet Anaïs. If it were a matter of finding a cameraman, I would just shoot it on an iPhone if I had to, but I wanted to get going already. But Anaïs had also been considering the timing. She thought that maybe, if we could wait until mid-May, I could be there to see her fashion show at Central Saint Martins. She said the show was always a huge deal, an extravaganza, where the students created the most spectacular outfits imaginable.
Anaïs’s parents were coming to London to attend the event, so that would be an added bonus for me, my chance to meet them as well. I asked Anaïs what she thought if I invited my parents to London, too, and she loved the idea. A full-blown event, if they agreed. Anaïs and I would meet first, of course, not as family units, but just the two of us, and then we would introduce our families. Already, Anaïs’s mother was anxious to contact my mother to introduce herself.
The production crew liked the idea of the London trip in May, because it would give us enough time to fund and organize the documentary. I reluctantly agreed, curbing my disappointment that I would have to wait almost three months to actually meet Anaïs in person. In the meantime, I continued to virtually meet her pretty much every day on Skype, as we bided our time until we could actually hug and poke each other’s noses in person.
As for raising the money, the team finally landed on the idea of crowdfunding to gain our production financing, which now seemed like the only way to do it. Social media had played such a huge role in Anaïs and me finding each other. Why shouldn’t we crowdfund? I knew that there was potential for our story to go viral, which meant a lot of exposure and perhaps a lot of donations.
Kanoa and I considered a few crowdfunders, primarily Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Finally, we decided to go with Kickstarter, the largest and best-known crowdfunding platform out there. First, we read all the tips about the website and talked to friends who had run successful campaigns using it. The familiarization process was filled with long nights of the production crew and me sitting at my dining room table, mulling over ideas for the documentary’s title and a name for our production company. Finally, we decided to call the film Twinsters. It was a decision made over a few drinks after sitting for hours at my dining room table. We wanted to merge some words together and coin a term. Twin . . . sisters . . . twins . . . twinsters. Aha! As for the production company, we settled on the name Small Package Films. Once we had our names and set up our project, I wrote the plea for funding:
Why we need your help!
We are firm supporters of the social media world, which includes crowd sourcing & funding platforms like Kickstarter! Without the world of social media, Anaïs & Samantha may have never been able to connect!
We plan to gain the entirety of our budget through this Kickstarter campaign. Creating a documentary can be very expensive, especially when you are traveling to Europe! Your donations will help us to fund production expenses, which include: travel, equipment rental/insurance, crew expenses & a DNA test for Samantha & Anaïs. They will also cover our post-production expenses, which include hiring a sound/picture editor, a graphic designer and everything in between.
As the launch date approached, we were feeling the pressure. We didn’t know if it was possible to raise that much money, and at the last moment, we decided to downsize the dollar amount to $30,000 and be frugal with our budget. We needed to raise the $30,000 in three and a half weeks, leaving us with two weeks to process the funds and still get us to London by May 16, in time for Anaïs’s fashion show. The rule with Kickstarter is if you reach your goal, then you keep the money, minus a 5 percent commission and some payment charges, and if you don’t reach your goal, then you forfeit it all. Only slightly more than half the projects succeed.
The night before the launch, I was up all night working on last-minute details. At seven the next morning, we were officially under way. Within a few minutes, our first donation, $100 from Eileen, came through. After that, the money started flowing. By nine, we already had something like $2,000, and by the end of the day, we had raised around $5,000. It was insane. I never expected people’s generosity toward a project for which there was very little in it for them, except to see an artistic endeavor come to fruition, happen so quickly. At the rate we were going, we’d need far less time than the twenty-eight days we had allotted.
Then followed the interest from the media. This part had me worried even before the launch, on account of Anaïs’s trepidation about making our story public. She was far more private than I, and I was worried that media bombardment might scare her off. I woke up the next morning to e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter messages, and Kickstarter messages from reporters from every major news network. Several of them had even tracked down my father and called him at work to get more details on the story. I wasn’t sure what to do! I hope they are not harassing Anaïs! was my first thought. When I checked in with her, sure enough, a reporter had contacted her, too. There were people messaging her Facebook friends and trying to call them by telephone. This was what I had been scared about: people intruding into Anaïs’s life. Luckily, Justin’s publicist was willing to field the media, so that was a relief.
One outstanding task was finding a cinematographer. Justin suggested Ryan Miyamoto, a friend of a friend. After watching an old reel on his website, I was overly impressed. Plus, he was dang cute, too. He looked like a Hawaiian Ken doll. Not too shabby to have around for several stressful weeks, eh? And he was available to leave the following week and spend some time away from home. He was the first and only option.
Now, it was time to get serious about planning the trip. We found a short-term rental in Shoreditch big enough for the entire crew. The final itinerary would include a day at the Harry Potter studios. After all, Anaïs and I both love Harry Potter.
Just as everything was falling perfectly into place, I got a message from a professor of psychology at California State University–Fullerton, who was a world leader in twin studies. Dr. Nancy Segal was also the director of the Twin Studies Center there. She had written several books on the subject of twins separated at birth, including Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study, published by Harvard University Press in July 2012, and Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth, released in August 2011 by Prometheus Books.
Not long after Dr. Segal contacted me, I went to meet with her on the Fullerton campus, which was only thirty minutes south of L.A. She has been studying twins for a long time. She was a fraternal twin, which made her interest and passion in the subject that much more personal. Her library was massive and had hundreds of books that could shed an enormous amount of light on all the possibilities of my situation with Anaïs. She was also doing a huge study on unrelated look-alikes, which was really fascinating, but fear-provoking in a certain way. It made me realize that although it was improbable that Anaïs and I were not twins, it was a possibility.
I was thrilled when Dr. Segal offered to lend her expertise to us. She even said she would coordinate a DNA test for us. Anaïs and I had been talking about doing this since our early communications, but we didn’t know the best way to go about it, so Dr. Segal’s offer was fantastic. She had a relationship with Affiliated Genetics, a laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah, that provides a range of DNA tests for government agencies and private clients. The DNA result was the crucial piece of information still outstanding. Anaïs and I were already convinced we were sisters, but the truth lay in the test. We wanted to be together through the whole DNA testing process. We’d allow ourselves to be filmed receiving the results, but we weren’t sure if we would be alone or have our families with us. We’d work out those details later. Dr. Segal would also do testing on each of us to discover our psychological and physiological similarities and differences. She even offered to let us film her lectures and do an on-camera interview, and all her contributions would be free. Anaïs and I gratefully took her up on
her offer.
Dr. Segal reviewed Anaïs’s and my birth records. She appreciated the similarities, that we were born on the same date and in the same city, and that we looked so much alike. The only doubt in her mind, she said, was that we had been managed by different adoption agencies, which is unusual for twins. Dr. Segal gave me two DNA test packets, one for me and one for Anaïs. She told me the test generally took three to four weeks to complete. However, when she explained our situation to the lab, they agreed to rush it for us.
Anaïs and I had originally wanted to both take the test and see the results together in London. Because the timing wasn’t going to work out, we changed the plan to collecting the samples together on Skype and then getting the results together in London. Dr. Segal agreed to keep the results confidential until Anaïs and I were together. She would give us the results live over Skype.
Until the genetic testing was complete, Anaïs and I were only hypothetically twin sisters—two girls born on the same day, in the same place, who looked almost exactly alike. However, I never imagined we weren’t sisters, not from the moment I saw Anaïs’s picture. If it came down to that we weren’t siblings, it was going to be even stranger. Everything up to this moment had been perfectly aligned, had perfectly fallen into place. There was no way that it couldn’t be true. I didn’t know true love yet, but I was certain this was what true love must feel like. When you know, you just know, right? By this time, we had decided if it turned out that we were not twins, we would still be friends. Anaïs was the only other person who understood what this particular experience had been like. The hopes, dreams, thrills, and even wary calm about the entire situation was only known by the person who was so often staring back at me through my laptop screen, Anaïs. It’s like being in a race. You know what to expect; you know the track; you know the rules; you know where the finish line is; you know the spectators are there; and you know you are not only hoping to win, you are absolutely going to. You’ve pictured it in your mind, and you focus on that alone. You hear the crowd cheering you on. There will be glory when the ribbon hits your chest, and you throw your arms in the air, but at the moment, you are just anticipating it, just breathing. You can’t plan for the worst. You have to keep your eyes forward, be there in that moment, and when the gun goes off, run full speed ahead.
And I did.
9
ANAÏS
DNA test
On Tuesday, April 23, at ten p.m. London time, two p.m. L.A. time, Sam and I were going to simultaneously, via Skype, swab our cheeks to collect our samples for the DNA test, which would prove or disprove we were twins. If we were twins, the test would even reveal if we were identical or fraternal. A DNA test performed on monozygotic twins will return results with 99.99 percent similarity. However, DNA from non-identical (fraternal or dizygotic) twins will generally be about 50–75 percent similar. For many twins, or families with twins, the only way to know for sure whether they are identical or fraternal is through DNA testing. By now Sam and I fully believed we were identical, but why not prove it within 99.99 percent probability, just to silence the doubters, although, in truth, there really were no known doubters left.
Ten p.m. was about the right time for dinner in Europe. We eat our last meal of the day much later than Americans do, but we usually keep it quite simple if we are eating in—a small plate of something, a little wine, a little dessert, and we are satisfied. Marie and Lucas were with me the night of the simultaneous swab, so they were right there in it with us, making it festive and fun. Right on schedule, Sam Skyped me saying she was ready.
Sam and I had been waiting to share this moment together for at least two weeks. The test itself was only going to take seconds, but we could make it bigger and better with some pasta and, of course, some wine! I might have had an American identical twin, but I am French!
It was funny that Sam and I were both using our kitchens as the test site. Looking at Sam’s from her laptop camera, I was impressed by how bright, yellow, and cheery it was. It seemed to me everything in L.A. was always drenched in sunlight and pastels, whereas everything in London was gray or darker, especially this time of year. Sam picked up her laptop and gave us a quick tour from her seat by rotating her webcam a wobbly 360 degrees. When we got to where the kitchen meets the living room, I could see the sun shining through the vertical blinds. Here in London, it had been pitch-black for a few hours now, although thankfully, the days were finally starting to get long enough to tell that spring was here.
Marie returned the favor of Sam’s laptop tour and took Sam around our kitchen with my laptop webcam. My kitchen is very functional and white, but we do have enough room for a fairly large white round table and four chairs for dining. As the camera panned by me, I was standing over the pasta pot making sure it didn’t cook longer than al dente. When I heard Sam calling out to me, I turned around, smiled, and said hello back. Lucas opened a bottle of white wine and poured each of us a glass . . . well, not Sam.
It almost seemed like she was at dinner with us, as we placed the laptop so it was pointing right at the table when we finally sat down. We French take our dining very seriously, so if our need to have a sit-down dinner before the DNA test seemed strange, it really wasn’t. My only wish was that Sam could have actually, not virtually, been with us in person.
Sam wasn’t alone, either. Once in a while, I could see her turn away from her webcam to talk to Ryan, who was there to film. Sam looked so American in her green plaid shirt. I loved everything about her, especially her positive attitude. She is always smiling, happy, and bubbly. I was wearing a horizontally striped white-and-black sailor shirt, so she probably thought I looked really French. The two of us were much quieter than usual, and for the most part, Marie and Lucas did the talking. When Sam would talk, Lucas would say our voices were so similar that if Samantha spoke French, he wouldn’t be able to tell who was speaking.
“You should have cooked the same thing, and we could have eaten together,” Marie said to Sam into the webcam as she took a seat at the table. Marie also spoke English with a heavy French accent, although she was more fluent than me. Sam and Marie had seen each other on Skype before and seemed to get along really well, which made me feel very comfortable. I liked that my friends were into my potential sister. In fact, it was really important to me, as it kind of validated me that Sam would surround herself with the same kind of people I tended to choose.
Sam was watching us as we started eating our spaghetti topped with a perfect spoonful of red sauce and the Parmesan cheese I had just finished grating, complemented by a bottle of red wine chosen by Lucas. “It’s weird that French people eat with both hands,” she remarked, meaning that we hold a utensil in each hand throughout the meal, not switching the fork, the way Americans do.
“OMG!” Sam exclaimed. “You guys are going to think we’re so rude when we’re eating together.” Marie joked that the American way wasn’t rude, it was all cultural. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. We were all laughing when Marie made her observation about a similarity in our laughs, much like Lucas had pointed out the similarities in our speaking voices. “When you two laugh, it’s exactly the same. It’s crazy!” I had never thought about it before, but she was right.
We put out theories about how it would be possible for us to still be blood relatives in the event we weren’t twins. Neither of us had ever had contact with anyone in our birth families/family, so all bets were off. “Our biological dad slept with two women?” I put out there first, pouring myself another glass of wine.
Marie thought that was hysterical. “At the same time?” she chortled, but I told her not at the same time, although the same day.
Sam had the grossest idea of all. “Or, if two brothers and two sisters did it, and then they got pregnant and they each had a kid . . .” Sam and I always went off on crazy, weird tangents whenever we had the chance to muse about how we came to be related. If we weren’t twins, w
e were going to be related, no matter how much we had to use our imaginations. We meant that much to each other already.
The conversation turned to the intense media coverage our story had been getting. Marie said everybody in London was talking about us, and Sam and I knew it was getting coverage in South Korea. Since the launch of the Kickstarter campaign, reporters from around the world had been trying to track us down. Lucas asked Sam how big the story was in the United States, and Sam said it was being talked about on all the major networks besides being all over the Internet. I really hadn’t anticipated this kind of attention when I had first contacted Sam. I still wasn’t any different than I had been on that day in February. It really was crazy.
At one point, the Skype call froze. I could hear Sam and Ryan talking, but I couldn’t see anything. Ryan was asking Sam, “Is it weird to see a French version of you?”
“Why’d she have to be French?” I heard Sam say as she broke out laughing. She was always teasing me like that, saying I was “soooo French!” She once told me that when she first heard from me, she had this image of me being totally stereotypically French—snobby accent, wearing a beret, and riding a clunky bicycle with a basket, a French baguette tucked under my arm. That’s okay! I thought she was sooooo American. I imagined her wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, and drinking one-liter cups of Starbucks coffee, walking in the streets with sunglasses on her way to the mall. I imagined her being super-easygoing, saying, “Heeeeey, guyyyys,” in an American accent, gossiping with her girlfriends at pajama parties, and talking about boys on a baseball field after she had finished cheerleading.
Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited Page 10