Lori and Dori

One day my roommate in New York told me a childhood friend of his was visiting and she was bringing Lori and Dori Schappell, conjoined sisters. This friend had been researching the girls for years and they were coming into town to be on The Joan Rivers Show. With my penchant for dinner parties in mind, he asked if I would plan a dinner for these girls; he didn’t have to ask twice. The problem was the guest list; I would have to be very careful. The sisters are joined at the forehead.

A carefully chosen few arrived that night along with our dear, neighbor Colleen O’Neill. My roommate, Kerry, called the girls at The Plaza and I listened on an extension. “I’ll meet you in the lobby and I’ll be wearing a cowboy hat (yes, a gay Texan) and a pink neckerchief. How will I recognize you?” I nearly fainted. In a few minutes he departed and I started preparation for who-knew-what. The only thing we could agree on was that it obviously couldn’t be a sit down dinner and we needed plenty to drink; plenty!

We lived on the 35th floor of Waterside Plaza and the garage was on the first three levels. As later recounted to me by Kerry, they all got in the elevator on the first level and then stopped at the lobby where a woman with two children got in. The woman was a typical New Yorker and tried to be aloof as she pushed Floor 26, but the children were astounded and kept saying, “Mommy, look. Mommy, look”. The mother kept pressing 26; it was a long ride.

You never can really be ready for something like this, but Lori and Dori were delighted at the attention. Lori is of average size, but Dori never grew beyond the age of 13 and had designed a stool on wheels that allowed them to move together. To make things all the more strange, Lori dressed in a rather frumpy way, but Dori was wearing a doll-like red velvet dress with lace trim (she reminded me a little of Claudia from Interview With The Vampire). I never left their side and could hear Dori whispering in Lori’s ear constantly, “What a cool New York party. Look at the view. Look at the food.” As you said something to one, the other would answer as she performed a 180 degree turn to face me. As the other asked a question a turn would happen again. This could get dizzying in a spirited conversation.

At one point it was decided that all the girls would go to Colleen’s next door. When they left, all of the guys fell into each other’s arms; I didn’t realize then that we did that not because we were glad to have survived, but because we were glad not to be them.

It was then that we heard guitar music and went next door. Dori was playing and singing Country Western songs; none of us could speak after that, although I so wanted to hear “I Fall to Pieces”. Later she would change her name to Reba and actually release recordings. The sisters tried to put a good spin on their lives, but theirs had been a life of horror, even torture. Their parents had given them up to be raised in a mental institution and only in their teens did a social worker realize they shouldn’t have been there. Dori enrolled in a Pennsylvania community college and the college sued for two tuitions, even though Lori would face the other way reading love novels (the girls won the case); every day they took a bus to the laundry that Lori folded clothes in. They slept on a convertible couch.

We really turned it out for them that evening; they got cherries jubilee for dessert. They really turned us upside down, too. Every now and then I read about them and remember how happy they were that night at the “Cool” New York party. Sadly, although the technology exists now to separate such a joining, it is too late for Lori and Reba. When one dies, the other will shortly follow; but, then, they told me that night that they would want it that way.