What happens when you look into a soul? When you catch a glimpse of a person’s naked truth, and their very being is revealed to you? Do you feel closer to them, or more afraid of them than ever, or a bit of both? Do you feel like you’ve seen something sullied but unflinching, raw but unencumbered?
We haven’t seen Drew Barrymore’s soul yet, I don’t think. I’m not all caught up on The Drew Barrymore Show. But we have definitely seen her sole bared, and that’s basically the same, right? Per Page Six, her soles are out there on the streets of New York, bare, blunt, refusing to be ignored. She was walking around outside barefoot, a sole free from constraint.
Now, I’m not going to be holier-than-thou about this. Yes, New York streets are disgusting, especially right now, post-snow, when all the sidewalk icebergs melt and the trash encased in them continues its life cycle to the ground. City streets are famously gross. We make up for it with some of the best tap water in the world, I’ve heard. And anyway, who among us hasn’t, in a time of desperation, sullied our soles on the rock-bottom pavement?
And sure, the temperature was a chilly 37 degrees, but after a long, hard winter, that is basically beach weather. Now I don’t know why I’m so passionately defending Drew Barrymore’s choice not to wear shoes at the exact moment a paparazzo took a series of photos of her. Perhaps it’s because after a year of extra-careful everything, this kind of nasty deportment is welcome? Soothing? Rebalancing? At the very least, it’s a fresh take on the “flip-flops in the city are bad” conversation that seems to hit the internet annually.
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