"What is fame?...

...The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little." - Lord Byron

Remember when all the movies and television you wanted to watch featured Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen? In the Sleepover Era of my youth, I remember countless MK&A videotapes and book series, when all my friends and I wanted was to be like our role models -- those cute identical twins on TV who had everything they wanted (including no parents? In hindsight, that made no sense.).

I had the fortune of being one step closer than many of my friends would ever got to becoming like MK&A... Because you see, most of my childhood companions, no matter how hard they tried, could not achieve the ultimate MK&A identity: having two of you. As a twin, I had an advantage to becoming just like my childhood and teen idols. I was convinced that I was destined to be famous. In fact, for a while I was more than a little bit bitter that surely I could have actually been Mary-Kate and Ashley if I were white. (And now that I think about it, changing one's race is seemingly scientifically more difficult than creating a clone. And probably more ethically inappropriate.)

When I think about it, my family is probably responsible for my lack of celebrity status. I have to give credit to my mom for starting my modeling career at age 2, when a saleslady at Dillard's asked her if one of her kids could be in the Sunday ad. Apparently I was less cranky than my counterpart that day, so I was selected to show the world my incredible sense of toddler fashion. However, my parents subsequently denied my access to the modeling world by not following up with the headshots and agent solicitations that are so crucial in the early stages of one's career.

Corey and I before my career was ruined:(don't ask me which one is which. we're identical.)

The other roadblock to my stealing someone else's fame is that my twin sister Corey has never had quite the thirst for fame that I have. While I spent my elementary and middle school years debuting my experimental fashions to the rest of the world, Corey was content to be a normal young person. Surely, if Corey had also worn that purple-monochrome outfit with matching earrings, rings, shoes, and hair accessories that I had planned so well in seventh grade, it wouldn't have been perceived as the flop that ensued. Bye-bye forward fashions. Not to mention that my parents are still married to each other, neither Corey nor Erin has done jail time, had an eating disorder, or posted inappropriate pictures to the internet. We could have been something.