Thelma or Louise, she ain\’t. 

Gwyneth Paltrow is not a blue collar, financially marginal woman or a welfare recipient, and she has somewhere to go besides off a cliff.

But, to listen to her lament about the life she leads, you\’d never know it.  Somewhere inside her is a desperate need to convince people that, despite their wholly privileged life, she has it no better, maybe even worse, than everyday people with everyday lives.

It doesn\’t work.  Nobody believes her.  But she keeps trying to convince us anyway.

Gwyneth Paltrow is famous for telling working women how great they have it compared to movie stars like her.  The key quote:

“…I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it\’s not like being on set”

How many women holding a “regular job” while trying to raise children, do you think, would decline a chance to trade lives with Gwyneth Paltrow?

Then, even more ridiculously, Ms. Paltrow compared getting negative tweets online to f comparing her work to a soldier at war.  What\’s that?  You don\’t believe she could have said such a thing?  Ok, I don\’t blame you for being skeptical, so I\’ll show you her exact words:

“You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it\’s a very dehumanizing thing. It\’s almost like, how in war, you go through this bloody dehumanizing thing and then something is defined out of it.”

How many soldiers in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, would like to live one or another of their mansions and regularly hobnob with Hollywood\’s elite instead?  My guess is quite a few.

Now Ms. Paltrow has embarked on another effort to fantasize she has any commonality with “the little people”.  She has announced that she is going to eat only $29 worth of food for a week, so she can experience the life of someone on government assistance.  To this end, Ms. Paltrow put the following picture and verbiage up on her twitter account:

This is what $29 gets you at the grocery store-what families on SNAP (i.e. food stamps)

have to live on for a week.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Ok, let\’s start with the most important fact:  welfare families are not expected to live on $29 a week or anything near it.  As of April 10th, the monthly amount per person – not per family, but per person – in the two states you are most likely to find Ms. Paltrow in, are $138.78 (New York) and $141.99 (California).  Click here and see for yourself.  So, right from the start this is ridiculous.

Now, look at that picture and note what Ms. Paltrow spent her $29 on.  Would those items cost you $29 in your supermarket?  I doubt it.  (Incidentally, how many welfare families use 7 limes a week?).

Oh, and in case you have trouble seeing what Ms. Paltrow is wearing in that little picture of herself, let me show it to you:

How many $29 dollar food allotments do you figure the cost of that outfit would provide the imaginary family she is talking about?

But, you might answer, Gwyneth Paltrow can\’t help being the elite, upscale celebrity she is.  So we should be happy that, however poor the attempt is, she is at least trying to….

….uh, fuggedaboudit.  She stopped trying after four days.  She quit. 

You can read all about it here, but let me show you a key part of the article:

“As I suspected, we only made it through about four days, when I personally broke and had some chicken and fresh vegetables (and in full transparency, half a bag of black licorice),” Paltrow, 42, confessed. “My perspective has been forever altered by how difficult it was to eat wholesome, nutritious food on that budget, even for just a few days-a challenge that 47 million Americans face every day, week, and year.”

(So that explains why she attended an $80 prix fixe menu event at L.A.\’s Animal.)

Her perspective was so altered that she broke her self-imposed food limit and ate at a place that, after the wine, tax and tip are added in, probably cost her five times the $29 amount.  For one meal. 

Yep, Gwyneth Paltrow sure does know what it\’s like to be one of the little people.

Last June, when I initially blogged about her comments regarding working mothers and soldiers at war, I ended by saying “maybe Gwyneth Paltrow could do us all a favor: maybe she could just shut up about her dreadful, unhappy life, and stick to acting.” 

To tell you the truth, this latest attempt so show her commonality with the rest of us has not changed my opinion much.