Alex and Grayson

A classic feature in The Blue and White, we bring you some Campus Characters from the latest issue of the mag! Virginia Fu brings us a profile on Columbia’s coolest twins—Alex and Grayson Warrick. Check out more campus characters and pieces about NSOP in the mag out now!

At one point during my interview with the Warricks, Alexandra Warrick spontaneously begins narrating her “aesthetic for the day.” She undoes her Brenda Starr, Reporter, belt and hands it across the table for me to see. Her shirt has got a “fucking cow on it,” her earrings were “swiped” from her grandmother and while some mistakenly believe that she was the one who drew on her Keds, it was actually a man from Kentucky. “Basically I’m just wearing lies, theft and deceit.” she concludes.

Asked how he would describe his aesthetic for the day, Grayson answers, after a moment’s thought, “Indigo.” Grayson “can neither confirm nor deny” that he is the man pictured in the BB408 Unisex Poly-cotton tank on the American Apparel website.

Alexandra, BC ‘17, and Grayson Warrick, CC ‘16, are twins. They spent seven months together in the womb of a famous ballerina, during which time Alex Warrick could be observed repeatedly kicking Grayson in the head—an experience Grayson refers to as his “brutal prenatal beatdown”—while Grayson tried to absorb Alex into his own body. Columbia represents the first time Grayson and Alex have attended the same school: the two were separated for “social development” reasons after preschool (“We distracted the shit out of each other,” says Grayson).

The casual observer could be forgiven, however, for believing that the two have carefully and specifically engineered their lives to throw you off the trail of this fact. “The first time I met Alex, I literally could not believe [that they were twins],” recalls a former Nussbaum suitemate of Grayson’s. “They showed me their Facebooks and I still didn’t believe them.”

The twins themselves agree that if they were drinks, Grayson would be “a nice warm cup of hot cocoa and Alex would be “something that fucks you up.” On campus Grayson is a COÖP leader and is on CCSC. Friends and observers joke that Grayson is the “cookie cutter model of the perfect person,” and speculate that his morning walk to class takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour due to his practice of stopping and and talking with everyone that he knows or vaguely knows.

Alex, who arrived at Columbia a year later despite being the older twin by 20 minutes, is someone who doesn’t let grotesque injury stop her from making rehearsal on time. (“She showed up with her face covered in blood,” a castmate recalls. “We sent her to the nurse.”) Alex believes she was typecast in a recent theater production when she starred as “a man in a coma who constantly screamed out garbage.” A friend recalls how when she questioned Alex about her newly shaved head, Alex replied “study break,” and “kept going with the conversation as if nothing had happened.” She has made decent headway into her goal of writing for every single campus publication. “Sorry for talking to you assaulting-ly,” is how she ends the interview.

Despite their devotion to two disparate spheres of campus life, the two maintain an affectionate relationship. Observers have correctly noted that hanging out with Grayson and Alex is like third wheeling with a couple whose conversation resembles “an Aaron Sorkin script on speed.” “I never understand everything they’re saying,” reports one of Alex’s CUSS costars, “Maybe if they took it ten times slower.”

Alex believes that Grayson’s role in the universe is to “add a warmth and a sparkle to the everyday” while Grayson believes Alex’s is to “bring an excitement never before seen.” And although Grayson believes that Alex “got all the creative genes,” the two in fact spend the interview trying to convince the other to star in their elaborately plotted ideas for absurdist CUSS sketches and Core Scholars rap videos. Last spring the duo starred in a Latenite production that ended with Alex and Grayson drawing lipstick over their faces and crying.

The twins may seem different, says a friend of Alex, but “when they’re together it all makes sense.”

Illustration by Rachel Chin