Chinese girl lip-sychs singing in the opening ceremonies, and I'm OK with that

A lot of people are righteously angered that the little girl singing in the Olympics' opening ceremonies was actually lip-synching, because, according to officials, the real vocalist is not as cute.

You know what? That wasn't a terrible thing. It's show business. It happens all the time. The most "egregious" case is probably Marni Nixon, soprano and musical film star extraordinaire. Actors who have lip-synched to her voice include Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr (at least twice), and Margaret O'Brien. Most of the time, she wasn't even credited.

Where's the outrage?

Oh, yeah, there is none, because it's show business. Both of these Chinese girls had their unique talents -- one is adorable and can skillfully lip-synch, and the other has a beautiful voice -- and the talents were put together for the show. Likewise, Audrey Hepburn could fake a Cockney accent just fine, but she couldn't sing her way out of a paper bag, as we all learned in Breakfast at Tiffany's. So, like the Chinese singer, Marni Nixon took one for the team (and a paycheck) by singing Hepburn's part in My Fair Lady. Nixon was and still is an accomplished actress on her own, as she demonstrated earlier this year by playing Professor Higgins's mother in a touring production of My Fair Lady.

Although, the conventional wisdom is that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences snubbed Hepburn for even a nomination for Best Actress as Eliza once word got around that she hadn't sung a single note herself in the film. But the scandal, if I may use that word to describe the situation, wasn't that Hepburn didn't sing her own songs. The problem was that Nixon's performance hadn't been credited. People were upset that the wool had been pulled over their eyes, not that Nixon had been considered too ugly to perform the role on-screen.

I think it's the same thing here. The issue isn't that the girl everybody saw wasn't truly singing. The only real issue is that nobody was upfront about it.

You know what was really worse, though -- when that little girl sang the French national anthem at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. She was six or something, a sweet tiny little girl, and here's my professional translation of some of the relevant lines of La Marseillaise:

The bloody flag of tyranny has been raised against us! (Contre nous de la tyrannie / l'Étendard sanglant est levé.)

[Our enemies] are coming among us to disembowel our children and our families! (Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes.)

I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! (Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons.)

And that's just the first verse and refrain. Some of these lines are sung twice!

(Actually, I lied about that last line I quoted. The more correct English is, "May our neatly plowed fields slurp up the impure blood of our enemies.")