The lives of three Hollywood starlets have become wrecks on the highway. Is everyone going to just let them burn or is anyone going to reach out to help?
The lives of the three wicked step-sisters of our time, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears, have become, Hilton and Spears figuratively, and Lohan literally, a late night wreck on the highway, lit with orange flares, surrounded by stern men urging us to keep moving, but we have to slow down and look, equally hoping to see, and not see, life changing carnage.
And if there is carnage, we can’t turn away, any more than we can ignore footage of the Twin Towers collapsing or the Challenger exploding. Even as it unfurls in front of us we still wonder, is it real?
Unless you work in the entertainment industry, or frequent after hour establishments in New York or LA, you have to ask the same about the stepsisters, are they real?
They seem to exist only in tabloids, both print and television, and web sites. We may not know what the President’s new nominee for the World bank looks like, but we have all seen the picture of Lohan passed out in her car, of Spears shaving her head, of a weeping Hilton being led from court after encountering a judge who did not understand the rules are different for the young and beautiful.
They aren’t real to us. They are characters in a trashy novel, a new soap opera on the CW, or an MTV reality show. While we gawk at the wreck of their lives, every second of which is documented on camera, we have become increasingly detached from the fact that these are very young women, like your daughters, or your sisters: Young, immature, self-important girls existing from party to party.
But when it is your sister, your daughter, or a friend, you step in. It will likely be a battle rivaling Shiloh, as you fight with every measure of devotion to show them the destructive path they are on. Some don’t listen, and are lost, but others do, and allow us to steer them clear of the hell that awaits them. But succeed or fail, we try, because we care.
But as Lohan, Hilton and Spears spiral out of control the question is does anyone care? What would you do if they were your daughter, your sister, your friend? How is it that no one is grabbing them and pleading with them to stop the late night drinking, the drug use, and for heaven’s sake stop flashing your va-jay-jay in public.
Is it the money? Is the behavior tolerated because their socially unacceptable actions keep them in the spotlight and lead to more record and movie ticket sales? Would you let your daughter dance with the devil in the pale moonlight if it enhanced your pocketbook? Occasionally a parental figure will surface in the tabloids with the excuse of the month for the girls’ behavior, which always rings false. These girls are meal tickets to a lot of people, and the easiest way to get that ticket nullified is to say no.
We are gradually moving from star gazing to deathwatch. The three stepsisters are linked arm in arm tramping down the yellow brick road laid by Anna Nicole Smith. How soon before we are watching grainy footage of EMTS performing CPR desperately trying to bring one of them back to life.
In the 60’s Mick Jagger asked, “Who Killed the Kennedys, after all, it was you and me.” Forty years later we have become such a pop-obsessed culture that the question is “Who killed Anna Nicole and Lindsay, after all it was you and me.”
