Charli and Dixie, IRL
When they aren’t dolled up for something like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards, where Charli in a strapless formal gown was doused in green slime like a latter-day Carrie, the sisters seem to recede into soft, blurry situations: dipping into ice cream, disappearing into hoodies and under blankets, hugging Squishmallows. Charli is scared to drive. “Curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs,” she mutters on the show, practicing. “Every time I’m free, I just want to be in bed on my phone, which is so bad,” Dixie says. The only sign that they might be ready to fight back is their manicures, which are incongruously sharp and pointy — talons, really.
These they waggled at me in person one morning after rainstorms flooded the subways of Manhattan, in an enormous penthouse apartment with views of the Hudson River — and, Dixie noted, dramatic lightning strikes. The obvious metaphor hung in the air.
Asked not about Dino nuggets but the moment when it all changed, Charli said, “I don’t know. It wasn’t like a snap that happened. More like, ‘This is happening, but I still feel the same.’ And now it’s happening on a much bigger scale, and I still feel the same, so I don’t know.”
Dixie would like eventually to settle in New York, where her parents courted a quarter-century ago, before cellphones became commonplace, rollerblading in Central Park. “I want to be here,” she said.
As for Charli: “I have no idea. I like everywhere. I kind of want to live in the middle of nowhere.” she said. “On a farm. Or like in the middle of L.A. Who knows. I go back and forth.”
Any anxious parent of quaran-teens, sequestered for so many months with their portals to heaven-knows-what — their temporary avatars out there for all eternity like so much space junk — could sympathize with this impulse to vanish into the pastoral. And also not hold her to it, on the eve of a Hollywood debut.
