During the blizzard of ’79, which dropped over 20 inches of snow on Chicago and closed schools for a week, sisters Christina and Dymphna Timmins were left to their own devices. “Our mom wanted us to stay in,” says Christina, who is now 34. “We had just gotten a stereo, so we spent a week doing a little radio show we made up. I think there were strikes in the school district at the same time. So we got on our fake little radio station and played the roles of all the teachers we disliked and had fake interviews about the strike and the snow and we just had a blast.”
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Until a few years ago that was their last collaborative effort. Then Dymphna, now 32, started taking acting classes. “The more classes I took, the more I realized I would like to tell a story rather than just act in one,” she says. She got together with her boyfriend, musician Owen Yen, and Christina, who was producing documentary videos, to talk about doing a project together. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we just do something fun and goofy,’” says Dymphna. “We didn’t have high aspirations for what it would be–maybe a 15-minute video we shot ourselves.
Occasionally, the actors–all of whom were unpaid–would freeze when the camera light came on. “One of our actors was not moving nearly as well as he had in rehearsal, and he was very uncomfortable and nervous,” says Christina. “We finally had to pretend that we weren’t shooting. People tend to be a lot looser when they don’t feel like they have to get it right the first time.”
–Cara Jepsen
