Perkins Twins: Make everything double

It’s easy to tell one from the other. They are twins, all right, but they are not identical. They are fraternal twins.

The Fil-Am twins were born on Oct. 14, 1993, at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan City. Jesse at 6’1” is an inch shorter and two minutes older than Christian. If they ever venture into acting, and they just might sooner than later, Christian would be an action/sexy star and Jesse the heartthrob.

In the meantime, the twins are into singing. They are the voices behind the song Ikaw Na (composed by Vehnee Saturno, now in the market, with an album coming soon) that opens and closes Boy Abunda’s Ikaw Na segment in the ABS-CBN late-night newscast Bandila. And they are into tennis, too, at the helm of the Perkins Twins Tennis Academy (PTTA) of EDSA Shangri-La.

“We play doubles,” said Jesse who is right-handed.

“We make a good team,” said Christian who is left-handed, “that’s why we love it.” They actually played with the Philippine national tennis team last summer and are planning to train more with them.

I got a feeling of déjà vu when the twins’ father, Norwegian-American Tarney Perkins (who used to own and manage a chain of cafés in Manila), gave me a surprise call and asked, “Do you remember the twins that you wrote about several years ago when they were pre-schoolers at Mother’s School of Child Development, which Mother Lily put up in front of her house on Valencia Street in Quezon City?”

Hit by a senior moment, I mumbled a “Yes, of course!” while scanning my memory. “They, rather we, would love to meet up with you again,” added Tarney.

So we did Monday last week at a meeting room of EDSA Shangri-La right after the twins’ workout at the Health Club which features at the entrance a standee of PTTA. The whole family was there, including the twins’ mom, Teresa “Tess” Pazziuagan, a retired Cathay Pacific flight stewardess from Tuguegarao, Cagayan. Tarney met Tess on a flight from Hong Kong to Manila and they soon fell in love and got married.

We retraced the past decade and a half, with the free-wheeling conversation punctuated every now and then with “Praise God!” Yes, the Perkins are Christian, which is reflected in the twins’ fine manners. They are the only siblings in the family.

“They spent their first few years in the Philippines,” said Tarney. “They studied for one year at Mother Lily’s school, then we brought them to the US and stayed there for 13 years. But they would come for a visit during summer. That’s how much they missed the Philippines.”

It was in California where Christian and Jesse nurtured their love for tennis. Initially, they were premier basketball players who competed on elite travel teams and won the National Championships while in Grade Five, went on to be the only sophomores on the Varsity Basketball Team in high school…until they fell in love with tennis and concentrated on it. In college, they were scholars at the University of California Berkeley. They have continued their schooling here, enrolled in an Entrepreneurship course at MINT (Meridian International College).

On the side, they did modeling jobs, coached by Charleston Pierce who does the Macy’s passport show in San Francisco. (As kids, the twins did a few TV commercials in Manila, one of them for Pampers.)

So what brought the family back?

“Actually, Mother Lily was instrumental in our decision to come back,” recalled Tarney. “Two years ago, we were here for a vacation. The boys had been playing tennis all summer and they were athletic, tanned and looking good. Mother Lily heard that we were here and she wanted to meet them. We did…at the Chinese restaurant in EDSA Shangri-La and she said, ‘Wow, you guys look incredible!’ She remembered that Christian and Jesse studied in her school. In fact, when we were leaving then, she told me, ‘Leave them here.’ I guess she saw something in them. When Mother Lily saw them again, that was two years ago, she told them, ‘You should come back.’ So we did.”

It was Tarney and Tess who got the twins into music.

“We only sang at home and in the car, all the time, but never in public, although the boys sang with the glee club in church,” volunteered Tess who calls herself the twins’ “mommy-ger” since she acts as their manager.

“Then,” Tarney took it up from Tess, “TFC (The Filipino Channel) got them on the show for tennis, because that’s their gift, and not for singing. They were in our house and they saw the guitar and they asked the twins to play the guitar on TV. Then, they asked if the twins could sing and, yes, they could, so they sang Tayong Dalawa (theme song of the Kapamilya teleserye of the same title). Two weeks later, TFC asked them to be the front act of a Kapamilya show, also in California.”

And that set the ball rolling, so to speak.

Welcome to the growing club of athlete-singers/actors/TV hosts (Benjie Paras, Joey Marquez, Jimmy Santos, Chris Tiu, Freddie Webb, Dyan Castillejo, Christine Jacob, et al).

Once featured on the Huwaran episode of the GMA show 700 Club as role-model kids, Christian and Jesse were brought up on a combination of Filipino and American values and what Tess described as “Biblical principles by which you train a child on the Christian way they should pursue.”

“We get invited as speakers in Christian forums,” said Christian.

“You know, we do inspirational talks to inspire the youth,” added Jesse.

The twins have taken a year off from school (Meridian) to try their luck in showbiz here. They are graduates of the Star Magic acting workshops. They recorded Ikaw Na (in fluent Filipino which they also speak without any American twang) in January and when the Star Records guys listened to it, they said it’s perfect as background song for Boy’s Bandila segment.

“Did you know that on that Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong where I met Tess,” recalled Tarney, who is planning to revive his café business which he will now call Cup Of Faith. “I was coming to Manila to form a band. Now, I have a band of two.”

For the Perkins twins, do make it…everything!...double — sport plus showbiz.

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