TWINSBURG, Ohio — Last weekend, Twinsburg was twinning.
Every August, for more than half a century, siblings who first met in utero take over Twinsburg for the Twins Days Festival, the world’s largest annual gathering of twins and multiples.
The celebrants arrive in twos, threes and fours, mirror images of each other or as dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff. Many are first-timers, but even more are repeat attendees stretching back years.
“This is our 43rd year,” said Fred Mitchell, 75, who drove up from Hollywood, South Carolina, with his next-door neighbor, who also happens to be his identical twin.
“We’re trying to get to 50 years and then maybe we will slow down,” added Ned, who was dressed in the same ensemble as his brother: neon green shirt, yellow sneakers, khakis, dark shades, bright smile.
The festival is held the first full weekend in August and always in Twinsburg, about 25 miles southeast of Cleveland. In 1819, identical twins Moses and Aaron Wilcox changed the name of the settlement from Millsville, which honored a popular mechanism from that era, to Twinsburg, which celebrated a biological phenomenon now affecting about 3 percent of the U.S. population.
The community first hosted an abbreviated version of the event in 1976 as part of a larger U.S. bicentennial celebration. Three dozen sets of twins showed up. Over the years, the festival has ballooned. It now stretches over three packed days, and the number of twins and multiples regularly exceeds 2,000 registered sets. (By Sunday afternoon, this year’s tally was 2,085; festival organizers will release a final count next month.) The identical and fraternal pairings arrive by car, plane, foot and baby stroller. A handful cross rivers, oceans and the international dateline.
“There’s nothing else that celebrates twins in this way in this volume,” said Twins Days executive director Andrew Miller, whose late father served as president and executive director for 30 years. “For most of the twins, it’s just a big family reunion.”
Miller, who has attended nearly every festival since he was 10, is a member of the clan, too. He has a fraternal twin sister and his wife is an identical twin.
Parade like it’s the 1980s
Township Square, a manicured park in the center of Twinsburg, was thrumming with activity early Saturday morning. The high school’s marching band was warming up with “Hang on Sloopy.” Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, sitting on a low wall, swayed to the beat. Michael Jackson and Michael Jackson strolled by.
The Double Take Parade is one of the festival’s marquee events, a 1.3-long processional that, depending on the theme, can feel like a march of pop culture clones.
For this year’s “Totally Two-bular,” participants threw open the 1980s vault, releasing into the streets a quorum of Madonnas, a pair of purple Princes, Barbies still in their boxes and the 1985 Chicago Bears led by a mustachioed Mike Ditka, still grumpy despite his Super Bowl trophy.
Some twins dipped into the history books. Rhode Island twins Kristen Coutoulakis and Elissa Coutoulakis Lombardo tore down the Berlin Wall; the Ruzbarsky sisters floated up from their 114-year-old ocean grave for the occasion.
“They found the Titanic in 1985,” said Linda (Ruzbarsky) Harold, 58, a seaweed-entangled crab clinging to her soiled life vest, “so we dressed up like survivors.”
Harold and her sister, Lorie Loyacona, first attended Twins Days at age 44, as a tribute to their father who had always wanted to bring his daughters here but died before he had the chance. Adding to the emotion of the weekend, they had also planned a twin reveal.
When they were born, the doctor told their parents they were fraternal twins, but the sisters sensed otherwise. They felt each other’s pain (including childbirth labor), had a root canal on the same tooth and finished each other’s sentences. Even their father couldn’t tell them apart, calling them “Twin.” So, they ordered a DNA test that they would open at the festival. But they couldn’t wait.
“It was a 100 percent match,” Harold said.
They attended their first Twins Days as identical twins.
Twins stick together
The parade ended where the activities began, at Glen Chamberlin Park, a rambling green space that can easily fit a few thousand twins.
Many events occurred simultaneously, so having a spare could help you cover more ground. However, as Arizona sisters Tracy Renbarger and Terri Jelinek told me at an unsanctioned after-hours party at the Bertram Inn, twins stick together like double-sided tape.
“You’re not going to see mix-and-matched or a sea of different people,” said Jelinek, 42. “You’re going to see twins standing next to each other with another set of twins or a group of twins talking. You never lose track of each other.”
The festival holds the same contests for oldest and youngest twins, as well as siblings who look the most and least alike, on Saturday and Sunday. However, with fewer participants on the second day, and therefore less competition, many people won just for showing up.
On Saturday, Janniece Curry and Anniece Johnson of Cincinnati clinched the oldest-twins category at 90 1/2 years old, their second straight win in two years. The following day, the champions were Florida twins in their 50s. The victors in the youngest category were slightly closer in age: three weeks and four weeks, respectively.
Ask a twin
The twins and multiples who attend Twins Days every year say the festival is a place where they can feel normal and understood. Where they don’t have to explain the difference between identical and fraternal or A and B (first and second born). Where they can wear whatever they want, which for many means dressing exactly the same.
“We find that more people are like us here,” said Kendall and Kennedy Bryant, the 16-year-old Grand Marshals from Twinsburg who spoke in unison. “Even at our school, the other twins don’t dress the same and they eat at totally different tables.”
Non-twins such as parents, spouses and the rare solo attendee like me typically play the role of personal photographer. We end up snapping photos for twins who are reconnecting after a year apart or have formed a friendship in the time it takes to find a singleton and hand over their devices.
“In a normal social situation, you feel like you have to ask them about their job and their life. But twins have this understanding. You give each other hugs, ask ‘How are you, twins?’ and then walk away,” Renbarger said.
The Twins Days twins love to talk about their unique bond, and they gamely fielded questions from a first-time attendee, their impishness on full display.
I asked the Mitchell brothers, who for the entire festival held court from matching camp chairs, if they ever secretly switched places in class or on dates. They pleaded the fifth on the romance question.
In the beer tent, Jim Colachis, a nightclub impresario who flew in from Los Angeles and has an identical twin, explained mirror twins to me: siblings who, when opposite each other, appear as reflections, as if they were peering into a looking glass. Searching the faces in the crowd, he scrutinized a pair of dark-haired sisters deep in conversation with siblings who could double as the Property Brothers. They were close, Colachis said.
Later that evening, at the Bertram Inn, he showed me a fun party trick — if I had a twin.
“Go up to someone and ask them if they have seen anyone who looks you,” he said.
He tried the line on a female twin, who politely chuckled but walked away without asking him to pose for a photo together.
Twin skin research
The line at the Olay booth was twice as long as the queue for funnel cakes, empirical proof that twins care more about free skin care than fried dough.
The festival dedicates a corner to research. This year, three universities, one plastic surgeon and Olay set up studies, taking advantage of the large sample size of twins — a windfall for researchers. Olay is studying how skin ages when genetics are not a factor.
For 20 years, the Procter and Gamble brand has conducted facial imaging on about 100 sets of volunteers, in exchange for a swag bag of lotions, serums and sunscreen.
“We have twins that we’ve seen every year, so they started at 18 and now they’re almost 40. Imagine what that looks like,” said Shannon Weitz, director of research and development at Olay.
One study, she admitted, turned fraught. The company had supplied one twin with products but not both, leading to complaints that the sibling using the skin care treatment looked better. To restore harmony, Olay gave the second twin a supply, too.
At 2:40 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, the festival paused all activities and the twins and multiples drifted toward the open field behind the research tents for the group photo. At 3:30, photographers perched in cherry pickers snapped the Twins Days family portrait.
After the photo shoot, the twins dispersed. Eddy and Marty Lee, 70, pushed their carts filled with stuffed foxes up the grassy hill. The toys were covered in commemorative Twins Day pins, the brothers’ young 1996 faces inches from their more grizzled 2026 mugs.
The twins were lightheartedly bickering. Marty grew exasperated at his brother. “You’re an ijit,” he said. Then he looked at me and said, “I’d be lost without him.”
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