The past year may have held for you any number of lowlights, such as getting cooped up in the house indefinitely, being thrown off your normal workout routine, missing out on the chance to have a nice birthday celebration, or worse. Everyone has had something bad happen, to be sure.
Even the rich and famous have suffered, with athletes not being immune to suffering terrible losses, and beloved star actors such as Tom Hanks contracting the virus (and consequently bringing the seriousness home for the first time to a lot of people). It has been an equalizing experience, no doubt.
And then there was Gwyneth Paltrow, to whom we can always turn when in need of a grounding presence to bring us back down to earth and realize what’s really what when we might otherwise lose perspective and get spacey. Because her low point this past year was eating bread!
Paltrow offered this sobering revelation in a recent interview, and one can hardly imagine how she did so without dying of the shame of it all, as you have no doubt done each of the dozen times a day that you were In so lowly a state as to ingest bread, even sometimes more than a morsel of it at a time.
Now, admittedly, Paltrow did not eat so much as to jeopardize her health. Nor did she eat bread that was in some respect compromised, causing her to get sick. Food poisoning, at a time when it might be confused with something even more serious, would obviously be a low point for a lot of people. But that’s not to say that eating a slice of flavorful sourdough isn’t bad enough, because it is!
It gets even worse, unfortunately. And you will no doubt want to turn away from the horror of it all, but we must not flinch in facing the darkness, lest it overtake us all. Because Gwyneth did not merely eat the product of a bakery. No, indeed, though that would have been harrowing enough, it got worse than that. For She descended so far as to consume, gasp of all gasps, pasta.
We are left to imagine some of the most shocking and sickening details here. Was the abomination of Italy’s cuisine that she took into her body pasta carbonara? Chicken fettuccine? Was it lasagna or tortellini? We do not know. We can only assume it might be any of them, and weep for her most profusely. It could even have been two of them.
And just when you think you may have gotten a grip on yourself after these waves of shock about the worst moments of a person’s life, it must be stated, sadly and solemnly, that not only did Paltrow eat pasta and bread during the quarantine, she further degraded her soul with moderate amounts of alcohol. That’s right: she drank cocktails of her own design, named after her grandfather, and never to the point of intoxication. There but for the grace of God go you.
We can but hope to learn from this period of time, and never repeat what happened within it. Let us, and especially Gwyneth, never again be forced to know the awful experience of eating and drinking well in a lovely home, in a nice area of the country with perfect weather.
