Céline Dion Stuns at Bonkers Olympics Opening Ceremony

A great Olympics opening ceremony should be a profound, stirring celebration of a country’s history and culture. It should also be absolutely batshit. On those metrics, I would consider Friday’s kickoff to the Paris games a rousing success.

The spectacle was, from my perspective, very French: I didn’t understand most of what was going on, but kept being aggressively told it was all very cool and so I convinced myself that I loved it. And then there was the Céline Dion of it all. (Not French, but can speak it!).

I could never have—even on my most potent cocktail of melatonin, weed gummy, and white wine—dreamed up the orgy of music, dance styles, and energetic skipping through the streets of Paris that made up the eclectic ceremony.

The can-can! Parkour! A queer ménage à trois in a library! Les Misérables! A nonbinary masked individual riding a horse. A choir of beheaded Marie Antoinettes singing in windows while a heavy metal plays and fire rages. An Olympic torch that resembled a giant blunt, or maybe a flaming baguette. A hot air balloon cauldron that looked like it was about to float on over to Oz. The Minions???

But the twin highlights of the affair seemed incepted from my dreams entirely: rousing performances by Lady Gaga and Céline Dion, in her triumphant return to singing on a major stage after battling a rare autoimmune neurological disorder.

Dion was a reward for anyone who sat through four hours of a decidedly bonkers fantasia. After watching thousands and thousands of athletes being dragged through the Seine looking like drowned rats while skateboarders dressed as clowns did tricks in the background, there she was.

In a blissfully dramatic fashion befitting Dion’s stage persona, first you heard her voice, a gold-medal belt that hasn’t been projected with that force publicly in years. I got instant chills. Then the camera zoomed in on the Eiffel Tower, dazzling with twinkling lights, to reveal Dion on a makeshift stage floating in the middle of the landmark.