Two of the Sirlesque boys are twins, a fact which is brought to our attention by a minimum of one randy drunk woman per show, when she finally realizes why Jack and Danny look so much alike.

People for some reason seem to think that being twins basically makes you the same person with two separate corpora. I've no idea why, other than possibly cognitive laziness. I've known a few other sets of twins in my time, most of them in college. One was a set of fraternal twins who were no more alike than any other pair of siblings very close in age, and as I recall, the sister spent a great deal of time wanting to smack her brother across the back of the head to make him shut up. Another pair were identical girls, although you'd be hard-pressed to notice that unless you got up close and stared a lot. They made a lot of disparate sartorial choices. One of them went blonde and wore a lot of neckties, and the other one was a borderline-anorexic weeaboo who was terrified of getting any older than twelve. You know, the usual.

Jack and Danny are so similar in their broad movements that from stage-distance I am eternally grateful that they've decided on different tattoos. Jack cut his hair short like Danny's at one point and I just gave up until it grew back out. At interpersonal distances, they wear very different expressions a lot of the time, and make rather different conversation. The two of them do not actually think alike so much as they are stuffed with a similar (very large) amount of IQ -- which is largely heritable -- and have spent so much time together that each one knows perfectly well how the other one thinks. It results in the two of them doing this thing where they give each other significant glances and look like they're having the entire conversation telepathically except for the parts they disagree on, which they debate aloud as a series of apparent non sequiturs. If they do have a secret twin language, it consists mainly of bickering over details.

Danny decided to introduce himself to me months ago at a party, where he rolled up when we were both three or four or nine sheets to the wind, and picked a fight over English grammar. Which I won, because I was marginally less drunk. Also I was right, but mainly just less drunk. I thought it was funny then, and I thought it was even funnier when I found out he was a philosophy major in college, because starting arguments about the inherent ambiguities of esoteric logical systems is basically philosopher-ese for "hello".

(He was also wearing a Captain Mal costume at the time, if that makes it any better. Which he had lying around because of a number they do called "O Captain, My Captain". It's Captain Mal vs Captain Hammer -- in other words, Nathan Fillion vs Nathan Fillion -- which explains why it gets some of the loudest screams of anything they've ever done, even though nobody takes any clothes off.)

Danny ran hot and cold with me for a while. Sometimes I'd be greeted as a friend, sometimes he seemed unaware that I was even in the room. I tried to work out the pattern, but came to the inevitable conclusion that the dip switches for those settings were entirely inside his head, and I wasn't around enough to have any idea what flipped them. He's pretty consistently warm now -- in his own way; neither of the twins are terribly touchy-feely, and I make a point of respecting their personal space -- but it took a while to settle in.

I am lazy about handwriting things, especially names, so most people I'm around a lot eventually get kanji. Danny's is 静, shizuka, which means 'quiet'. This has gotten steadily more and more ironic over time, as he's now familiar enough with me that I often get to hear his entire thought process in meticulous detail, especially after he's had a couple of beers. (Which is sometimes at unexpected times. I keep a list of the odd things the burlesquers have prompted me to say, and he's the reason one of the entries is, "Why are you drunk at the gym?" Apparently their dodgeball league involves a lot of booze.) He's still low in volume, at least, and I find the strangely precise ramble rather charming.

Jack's, on the other hand is 羽, hane, 'feathers'. Like you find on pretty things that are up in the air all the time. His bio on the Sirlesque site at one point claimed he only did 'pirate-based burlesque', but this is inaccurate snark; both brothers are acrobats, and Jack is the one who does aerials. He talks to me less than Danny does, but I don't think it's intentional -- I think he just lives in his own head a lot, and isn't aware that it's noticeable. He used to start quite obviously every time I spoke to him, like I'd just reminded him that he was visible to other humans; now he's down to doing that only about half the time.

I told Jack once that one of the reasons I liked watching him work was that during his performances was the only time I could really read what he was thinking. Both eyebrows shot up and he went 'oh', but I still have no idea which part of that he hadn't realized before: that he wasn't policing his expression when he was up on the silks, or that he was policing it so well otherwise that nobody had any idea what was going through his head. I also told him once that he was interesting, and he thought I was giving him too much credit. How you can maintain that notion while hanging upside down by your ankles fifteen feet above the theater floor and stripping off your clothing on stage on a regular basis, I don't know, but the discrepancy probably explains why he thinks nobody's paying attention to him.

I've taken to entertaining myself lately by just walking up to Jack and delivering all the random observations and compliments that cross my mind, then wandering off again when he has no answer. He'll eventually quit being confused by this, but I have no idea what'll follow.

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