Live TV is always unpredictable, especially when you add young children to the mix.
Chloe and Alexis Rudner are the adorable 1-year-old identical twins who rock out in unison on a home video that's gone viral. More than 2.7 million people have viewed the clip of the two girls in high chairs, swaying back and forth with huge grins on their faces as their dad strums the guitar.
Trying to recreate that magic in front of the cameras on Thursday morning? Not easy. Alexis wailed and Chloe seemed more interested in ripping off her cute pink headband as their dad, John Rudner, gamely played guitar. Any parent who's tried to get kids to be cute on cue could probably relate.
"Alexis, you're right; it's early, we all feel like crying," TODAY's Savannah Guthrie said.
No matter. In a taped warm-up in TODAY’s green room, the girls danced to the song just as they had before. They’ve still got it.
“It’s kind of crazy,” their mother, Ashley Kimble Rudner, told TODAY about the huge reaction to their original video, which was posted Aug. 8. “We didn’t expect this,” dad John added. He attributed the quick spread to a Twitter posting of the video earlier this week by Ellen DeGeneres, who implored: “Come on! This video is adorable.”
The twins love all kinds of music, their father said, from Britney Spears to Pearl Jam. “I play everything that I can think of,” he said on TODAY. “It’s a wide range and they just love it all.” Rudner plays his guitar for the girls at least once a day at their home in Kansas, often when they’re eating.
The song they groove to in the viral video is a composition their dad wrote himself several years ago, called "My Paradise."
As the strumming begins, the twins first look each other with huge smiles before starting to bop to the music, in a shared moment of joy as they eat their peas.
The way the twins reinforce each other’s happiness at hearing the guitar is the start of an intimate, lifelong relationship, said Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and a twins researcher.
“Even at a young age, identical twins appear to be attuned to similar events in their environment and will likely respond in the same way,” she said. “Experiences like this are the beginning of their lifelong bond.”
Their harmonious reaction to the music “suggests a contribution from their common genes,” she said.
At one point in the 45-second video, the girls look at each other and seem to share a chuckle.
“At the very end they looked at each other and they seemed to enjoy the moment,” Segal notes. “That creates the origins of this twin bond that many identical twins describe as one of great understanding of one another.”
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