Free I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting by Rebecca Harrington Page A

anchovies. The catch comes when I actually look at the serving size of pasta Sophia is asking me to eat. It’s about as small as a balled-up fist, which I have always heard is the actual serving size for pasta, even though I have never eaten such a portion. When I finish my helping of pasta I am starved, and in some ways hungrier than I have been when I forced myself to eat something disgusting, like tofu cheese or seed falafel. This diet might actually be harder than I thought.
    Later, before going out to dinner and a show, I decide to peruse Sophia Loren’s beauty tome
Women & Beauty
to get some tips.
    To that end, I really scrub my head when I’m in the shower. (“Keep running the warm water through it until every last bit of soap is gone and the hair squeaks.”) I put on a severe amount of eye makeup (eyes “deserve the most attention,” says Sophia). Because it’s a rather formal outing, I wear a dress I actually took to a tailor once. The problem is that because it fits correctly, it is not very comfortable. It’s also electric blue, which Sophia would probably disapprove of. She, for example, thinks purple is too “violent” a color and used to dye all her clothing black, even her handkerchief.
    For dinner before the show, I have a small helping of pasta and some shrimp and am again oddly starving. I don’t really understand why. I’m sure this was enough food, technically, to survive. It’s more that it was just so delicious, I actually want to keep eating it. I look longingly at the M&M’s my companion eats during the show, but I control myself, as Sophia does not believe in the American habit of snacking. I also realize that whether I am actually allergic to gluten or whether I have made myself think I am allergic to gluten, I am fancying myself ill throughout the second act. Time to switch to gluten-free pasta?
     
Day 2
    The next day, I continue to be hungry. I make myself an English muffin (Sophia likes them) and a scant hour and a half later decide to have my lunch, pasta in a lemon cream butter sauce. The pasta is very lemony and kind of bitter because you have to grate lemon rinds into the butter. Still, it’s delicious. Too delicious to stop eating so prematurely! This is starting to remind me of when Sophia Loren’s mother won a Greta Garbo look-alike contest and was promised a trip to America to have a screen test but then her mother (Sophia’s grandmother) wouldn’t let her go because she was worried that the Black Hand was going to murder her just like they murdered Rudolph Valentino (even though Valentino died of appendicitis, but whatever). So Sophia Loren’s mother had to stay in their tiny Italian town and eventually had an illegitimate child (Sophia) out of rebellion. An all-pasta diet seems great until it is ripped cruelly away from you.
    In the afternoon, I decide to walk with my friend all around the city. Walking is Sophia’s preferred mode of exercise, and she walks for a long time every day. At one point, my friend and I stop for a minute and both think about buying overalls. They are very in now. But then I remember how disappointed Sophia was when her niece wore clothing that Sophia found awful, like “baggy pants and strange tops that made her look like a farmer at Harvest time,” and so I don’t buy them.
    For dinner, I try to make Sophia’s tomato sauce over gluten-free pasta. I couldn’t keep eating the whole wheat pasta. The rash never returned, but after reading a WebMD article about gluten intolerance I think I have all the symptoms on that page. I feel bad begging off Sophia’s preferred pasta, but gluten-free pasta is far worse than regular pasta and this does seem to fit my estimation of Sophia’s powers of self-denial. Cary Grant was always proposing to her and she always said no. One time her sister (who married Mussolini’s son???) openly mused, “I sometimes wonder if Sophia today has any fun in her life.”
    As any Italian home cook knows, you are