Phony Toni

Here in Vegas celebrity immitation is par for the course... And big business.

Along the strip there are attractions featuring everyone from the "Rat Pack" to "ABBA." Heck, I even saw two Elvi during my trip to the DMV last week. The point is playing along... In a town where an Egyptian pyramid is just a few blocks away from the Eiffel Tower, disbelief has been officially suspended... If not by an act of the Legislature, then by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau (which is more powerful anyway.)

Not so in Suriname, where Trina Johnson-Finn was released from jail after three months, and a promoter's admission that she hadn't been aware that the audience who greeted her last performance prior to arrest with boos, bottles and beer cans had been sold a lie. It wasn't so much that she was bad, she just wasn't the real Toni Braxton.

Here in Las Vegas those kind of people are called a "tribute artist." Elsewhere the term is "fraud."