For a long time I had a soft spot in my heart for Lindsay Lohan for one reason. When my daughters were younger, she was the star of the remake of The Parent Trap, along with Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson. That was in 1998. My youngest was four. All three daughters loved the movie and my youngest was a modest Lindsay Lohan fan for a number of years.
That was until my daughter began to understand that as Lohan got older, her behavior continually got worse. It's amazing to me that my daughter, who's about half Lohan's age, has a better understanding of what good behavior should be than does the former star who's going on 25.
For a while I gave Lohan the benefit of the doubt for a variety of reasons. Her mother started her on a modeling career when she was three years old. Three! By the time she starred in The Parent Trap at age 10, she'd already shot more than 100 television commercials. I don't know how you feel about that, but I think it's pure lunacy to put your child into that environment at three years old, and continue the activity at such a rigorous pace during a time in the child's life when she should be playing with Barbie dolls, selling Girl Scout cookies and playing beehive soccer. So strike one against the mother.
The second reason I gave Lohan a pass was the bad behavior of her parents. Her father, Michael, was a Wall Street guy, and her mother, Donata, is a former singer and dancer who just happened to form her own movie production company about the same time her daughter was rising in the industry. Coincidence? Her parents separated when she was three years old, got back together, separated again, then finally divorced several years ago. The relationship was allegedly pretty turbulent and it was rumored that Lindsay often had to get in the middle of her parents arguments.
Her father has had run-ins with the law on several occasions, and in 2009 he released recordings of private phone calls to the media, phone calls between he and his daughter. Add to that what I consider the mother's exploitation of her daughter, beginning at age 3, and I can only conclude that Lindsay didn't have what I'd consider a normal childhood. Strike two against Dad, and the parents as a team.
But here's the reason I put Lohan on the list of Females we Don't Want Our Daughters to be Like. Despite the rocky relationship, brushes with the law, and sometimes offensive behavior by Lindsay's parents, and despite the fact, I believe, she was deprived of a normal childhood, there comes a time when you reach a certain age and you have to put those things behind you and act like an adult.
Lohan has failed to do that. Her transgressions began in the middle 2000s starting with all-night partying that caused her to be late for acting jobs in movies, or caused her to miss work all together. Then she began accumulating DUI arrests like the old ladies at Sunday Bingo collect good luck charms. She's made several visits to drug rehab, and and she's done a couple of short jail sentences. The jail time could've been avoided. She's worn the orange jumpsuit because she's stupid. The Hollywood media calls it 'defiant.' If the judge tells you that as part of your sentence you are required to submit to weekly drug tests, and you then fail one of those drug tests, that to me is stupid.
If the judge tells you what the conditions of your parole are, and you then violate those terms, especially after people have put up money to bail you out, that is stupid. No, this isn't Forrest Gump-stupid. This is Flounder-stupid (Animal House, remember, "zero, point, zero, zero. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son.").
Of course, in an attempt to endear herself to the judge who mandated her recent three-month rehabilitation stint (in which she was released in early January) Lohan decided to steal a $2,500 necklace from a posh jewelry shop near her home. Of course, Lohan says she borrowed it. The owner says that is not correct and that the store has a very specific procedure to follow and paperwork to fill out if a celebrity wants to take a piece of jewelry out on loan. That procedure was not followed, and apparently the police have store video showing Lohan wearing the necklace in the store, but never paying for it. How it ended up at her home is a mystery. Or so she'd like us to believe.
Probably the best way for Lohan to get back into everyone's good graces would be for her to behave more like the characters she played in movies like The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Herbie: Fully Loaded instead of her more famous turn as Cady Heron in Mean Girls.
P.S. Don't forget to tell your daughter that you love her.
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