THE JANIS IAN OF CHINA

Oh Lord, this is a sadness I know too well.

Ever since I drew the longer straw and won the role of Snow White in my Christmas pageant [we were a post-modern kind of school, with our Ackeresque rewriting of female roles at Xmas] instead of my best friend, the more palatable Doris, and watched the faces of all my grade 8 class drop in sheer horror. And then overheard my teacher mutter under her breath, 'Elephant' in the wings as my [why???] skinny ass exited the stage and ran to make what was supposed to be a hilarious re-exit on stage right, I know the Janis Ian heartbreak of being the ugly girl.

I didn't watch the Chinese Olympics opening and missed the ethereal beauty of the little girl on the left belt her cookie-cutter heart out, because frankly I wasn't interested, and plus I was busy drinking my elephantine pain away on a patio. But now I'm interested.

According the The Huffington Post:

"A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland," a ceremony official said -- the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games. . .'The audience will understand that it's in the national interest, Chen said in a video of the interview posted online Sunday night. The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen, Chen said. "Lin Miaoke was the best in this. And Yang Peiyi's voice was the most outstanding."

How can a lip-syncing little bitch have a better grasp of a song than the actual singer of the song? God. The indignity!

So, in the age-old, sorrowful song of the plucky ugly girl that bravely faces her first realization of the how the real world operates in all the classes in all the schools in apparently all the world:

"I am proud to have been chosen to sing at all."

Thanks to The Huffington Post