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Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman lip synch for Barack.
January 23, 2009 12:55 AM

Yes, that's right: Yo-Yo and Itzhak and Millie Vanilli are one and the same:

It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close. The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama's oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday's ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president's swearing in (which had problems of its own).

"Truly, weather just made it impossible," Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. "No one's trying to fool anybody. This isn't a matter of Milli Vanilli," Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because of its lip-synching, making it synonymous with the practice.

Did you ever think you'd see Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Milli Vanilli in the same story? Not to mention that Ms. Florman is totally dating herself.

Milli Vanilli? That's such an 80's story...almost a Ronald Reagan story, actually...

Read the entire thing here. It's hilarious.

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