Let's Help Gwyneth

Okay, people, enough joking around. I'm serious. It's time to get Gwyneth Paltrow the help she so obviously and desperately needs. If someone doesn't step in soon, there's no telling where this could end up. God forbid she buys her own television channel because that's the kind of tragedy that often happens in these cases, you know. Think deathly pale anorexic Oprah sans soul.

Look, I have no beef with Gwyneth the actress one way or the other. I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love and liked her okay in The Royal Tenenbaums and as Iron Man's secretary/love interest, she was a fine foil - and about as thin - for Robert Downey Jr. I can't remember what else she was in, though I do remember she dated Brad Pitt and she used to live around the corner from my friend, Patty, in NYC. That was my breadth and depth of All Thing Gwyneth.

But Gwyneth wouldn't stop there. No. Suddenly, she was all over the place including in my face. On The Daily Show giggling with Jon Stewart. Presuming to play country on the Oscars. Buzzing about like a mosquito on a muggy summer night with her website - oh, dear Lord, I can barely bring myself to write it - GOOP. (More like a cross between cute and puke which means it should be renamed CUKE or PUTE).

GOOP is a newsletter that offers helpful hints on what to eat, what to buy, how to meditate and cleanse (lots of cleansing) and exercise so that we can, with practice, be just like Gwyneth. Only poorer and not married to a British rock star. It gets 2 million visitors a day!

GOOP is also a fertile field of Gwyneth's over-developed sense of self and lost connection with reality which I'm pretty sure adds up to some sort of syndrome. Napoleonic? No, that's a law. Marie Antoinette? If that's not in the DSM IV, it should be.

Sometimes - like when I want to distract myself from the pain of a splinter in my eye - I will peruse GOOP with its "Make," "Do" and "Be" categories each of which hold impossible bars that only those with no jobs and 'round the clock child care can hope to reach.

For example, in recommending places to say in her adopted hometown of London, Gwyneth's first recommendation is The Connaught Hotel which is the kind of place that unlike the Best Western doesn't helpfully list its rates. This is because the rooms start at @$500 and go up to @$3,250. Before taxes and room service. I'd be shy about posting those figures, too.

But, okay. She's wealthy. She can afford to stay in The Connaught while her London townhouse, ahem, is being renovated. About that: Gwyneth purchased THREE London townhouses and is combining them into one. All I can say is if she's disconnected from reality, at least it's OUR reality. Her mileage obviously varies.

Did I mention the house in The Hamptons and Manhattan? Sorry. Just had to sneak that in.

Anyway, she is concerned with working women. Yes! This is the human interest part of GOOP and a great chance for Gwyneth and her Goop People to find the impoverished, hardworking single mother trying to keep the rent paid, food on the table while insuring her children are educated and motivated to make the most of their lives. And whom does she interview? Why, of course, rock empire heiress and noted designer Stella McCartney !

Oh, dear me. Do you see what I'm talking about here? The disconnect and everything?

Plus, I think we have a definite eating disorder on our hands. Because from what I can tell - her published cookbooks to the contrary - Gwyneth doesn't eat. She cleans. Obviously, this confusion stems from an upbringing of having other people cook and clean for her. She needs to learn that most often we consume food and water to nourish our bodies, not clean our colons and wash out our livers. I swear, you could eat off Gwyneth Paltrow's liver.

But all the GOOP and designer clothes aside (she urges you, her female reader, to "save up" for a Chanel that you, too, can pass down to your daughter who may or may not be named after a fruit), it's the country music thing that really has me worried.

Look, hon, country music is a medium of pain and hardship. It is made up of ballads about loves lost, men run off, jobs gone and dogs skeedaddled. Country music queen Loretta Lynn was a mother at 14, grandmother at 28. This is the kind of well of hurt you gotta dip your creative ladel into. I'm sorry, but graduating from The Spence School and living in three London townhouses at once while sampling the Mediterranean cuisine with a spruce wheat lemon cleanse is not going to turn you into a coal miner's daughter.