Lindsay Lohan, It's Time to Leave L.A.

Lindsay Lohan ran smack into more legal trouble this past week as she allegedly got involved in a hit-and-run, prompting potential criminal charges and an awful lot of tabloid fodder. TMZ reports that she has placed herself on house arrest to avoid any further legal trouble until her probation ends in two weeks.

Okay, my advice is simple to the laundry list of young celebrities who can't seem to handle the powerful mix of youth, fame, and money in paps-filled Los Angeles: Leave town, STAT.

Some celebrities seem to manage fame well, and many of those rise above the drama by living in other areas of the country. I'm talking about Matt Damon, Meryll Streep, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, among countless others. They must be onto something, no?

To make sense of this, I have to reflect on my own experience as a regular guy. When I went to college, I attended a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, and headed down to the city for graduate school when I was a little older and more mature. I'm always thankful that I went to college away from the big city because, quite frankly, big cities offer scads of distractions and temptations.

For the young celebrity set, they need to be more careful than their non-famous peers because they can get into much bigger trouble and, when that happens, they do it in front of the cameras, to boot.

In hearing about Lindsay's latest drama of the week, I recall something a high-level LAPD staff person said when Britney Spears was having her breakdown: Stay home, because you're costing the city a lot of money when police need to follow you to ensure your safety. At the time, I thought she needed to leave LA, too. If any of these young women were my child, I'd take them to a cabin in the woods for a month until they could calm down and get their priorities straight again.

Lindsay and some of these other young celebrities need to get real and accept that some places are too full of temptation. What Lindsay needs to do is focus on getting her life back together, and she'd be much more successful in doing that somewhere far, far away.