The summer after I graduated high school, I worked doing food prep in one of the busy restaurants at SeaTac Airport. I was merrily making pasta salad one day when one of the servers came dashing into the kitchen. “You gotta see this woman out here!”
I went out with her to the service line area, and my twin was staring back at me from the other side of the counter. We just stared at each other for a bit, wide-eyed, and then we both shook our heads and went back to what we were doing. What else could we do?
One of my Mom’s clients told her that her twin worked as a teller in the client’s bank, and was so insistent that Mom stopped in there one day. Both plump red-haired women in their 40s, and they really did look alike. They even had similar first names – Clarice and Claire. Weird.
OOH! Just remembered! When I was a travel agent, a woman called asking for prices for a weekend trip to Reno for her two daughters. When she agreed to make the booking, I asked for the names of her daughters. She said one was Gina Smith and the other was Gina Jones (not real names). Then she said, “You’re probably wondering why they both have the same first name.”
“I assumed one was your stepdaughter or something like that.” Nope.
The woman had gotten pregnant was she was 17, and had given the baby up for adoption. She had been told that the baby was to be adopted by a family from eastern Washington. She didn’t see the baby at all after she was born, she just signed the paperwork and that was that. What she didn’t know was that the baby had been born with some sort of fairly minor deformity in one limb, and because of that, the adoptive couple refused to take her. The baby’s deformity was corrected surgically, and she was then adopted by a family who lived in the same general suburban area as the birth mother.
Within a year, my client had married her boyfriend (the father of the baby they gave up), and they proceeded to have first a boy, then another girl within two years. Eventually the younger two kids are in high school. One is a cheerleader, the other a star football player.
The Mom works for the school district’s administrative offices. She and her daughter look very much alike, and both are frequently told that there’s a girl at another high school in the district who is also a cheerleader and who also resembles them very strongly. The district has only four high schools, and the two in question are less than 6 miles apart. The Mom thinks it’s a coincidence, still believing her first child was living on the other side of the state.
When Gina1 turned 18, she sought out her birth parents, and voila! All was revealed. The mother and daughters are so alike, it’s obvious they’re related. The adoptive family had named Gina1, while the birth family had coincidentally chosen the same name for Gina2. They also had similar middle names. The scary thing? The brother and Gina1 actually met once at a party!
It also turned out I knew the older Gina; we’d gone to high school together.
