Starlets: The Real Achievement Gap

Slate recently published "a rambling, semi-literate" (in the words of the NY Post's Page 6, which broke the story) e-mail sent by starlet Lindsay Lohan to 18 of her closest friends and lawyers. A sample:

I am willing to release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite letter to the press if any of you are willing to help.

Simply to state my opinions on how our society should be educated on for the better of our country. Our people...

Also because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see.

While I'm psyched to learn about Ms. Lohan's interest in improving the education of our society, I can't help but wonder if there might be some serious gaps in her own. It appears there's some doubt of whether Ms. Lohan, or simply someone claiming to be her, actually wrote this story. Count me skeptical, anyway.

But if Lohan did write it, this is her second rather curious epistolary episode in less than a month, following a similarly confusing, though clearly heartfelt, letter of condolence to the family of the late director Robert Altman, who passed away in late November. Lohan had appeared in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Both letters are rife with sentence fragments, weak in organization, and suggest that in addition to misspelling "adequate" Ms. Lohan is also somewhat confused about what the word means.

I don't mean to make fun--heaven knows I've made my share of embarrassing gramatical and spelling errors in the webpages of this blog. But I am deeply concerned about the apparent and troubling "starlet crisis" within our education system. Clearly we need a No Starlet Left Behind Act, stat. In the meantime, I'm suggesting that Ms. Lohan could benefit from some supplemental educational services. Rachel and our sweater model could certainly whip her writing into shape, and I bet I can think of some male writers with mad verbal skillz who might rise to the challenge.