That Girl

We had a bit of a mad cackle reading the featurette on "food fiend and model-actress" Padma Lakshmi in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. The story presents Padma Agonistes, torn between her desire to see the second season of "Top Chef" do well and her fear that it will do just that, because then "people will only see me doing that, and they already know me like a model....Will no one ever hire me again because they'll say, 'Oh, she's that girl?' "

We sympathize with Padma in her battle against that-girl-ness. We know her like a model, too (which, honi soit qui mal y pense, has no Biblical connotations whatsoever). But we want to reassure her.

Padma, luv, posing seductively in a fitted chocolate-brown dress with a pile of Rainier cherries in the general vicinity of your nether regions, and posing prostrate in a silver bikini and silver stilettos, surrounded by crustaceans with their claws rubber-banded together, and with a gathering of male cooks (their own claws not rubber-banded at all) ogling your own tureen of lobster bisque and pondering cockles and whelks--well, that's exactly the strategy to ensure that people don't think of you as "that girl."