July 4th, 2007 Was Iconic

This Week in 2007 is a weekly column looking back on Lindsay Lohan, the first iPhone, George W. Bush, and everything else we loved about the year 2007.

It's a Fourth that many millennials have remembered, but most people assumed Lindsay would spend her 21st in therapy sessions. After Lindsay passed out in a car outside the Roosevelt Hotel on Memorial Day 2007 (her personal problems weirdly have to gone down on American holidays), she had decided to reside at Malibu's Promises Treatment Center for 45 days. On June 18, 2007, People reported that she had cancelled her huge celebration at Pure nightclub in Las Vegas to focus on her health, and her publicist later told the Washington Post that Lindsay herself chose to wear a now infamous SCRAM alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet.

She was practicing the American tradition of self-help and could have published a rehab diary that was the Walden of the Bush Era! Instead, Lindsay decided to flee the facility to party with her mom, notorious momager Dina Lohan, in a beach-side Malibu estate.

For Lohan family standards, the party looks ill-advised but innocent. Photographers shot Lindsay hugging Dina on the house's balcony. While wearing a white bikini and unbuttoned cut offs, Lindsay smoked and danced with AJ Lamas (son of Grease actor Lorenzo Lamas) who wore nothing but black boardshorts in X17 paparazzi photos. (Ron Jon Surf Shop and Quicksilver were the men's equivalent of Juicy Couture.) At one point, Justjared wrote, Lindsay smirked and clutched a digital SLR camera, which she used to capture paparazzi invading her beach turf. Elsewhere during the weekend, People claimed she visited the Chateau Marmont to sip tea and watch a man play the lobby piano.

Lindsay spent most of her time at the Malibu home that photo captions and reports describe as a "private residence." Somehow, Getty Images got into the allegedly secretive fortress to capture Dina, Lindsay, and her sister Aliana posing in off-white mini-dresses. Their photos show Lindsay blowing out birthday candles and casually wearing a sparkly crown.

She dominated the weekend's celebrity news, but Lindsay was not the only celebrity sparking interest in Malibu. Brody Jenner and The Hills guest star Frankie struggled to row a kayak through a puny Malibu wave that made TMZ headlines.

According to Justjared's post, Lindsay's on-again/off-again enemy Hilary Duff (Google "Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff fight over Aaron Carter") and her sister, Haylie, threw a shindig at a beach house. Hilary wore black, while Haylie dressed in white. Photographers snuck into the party, and the sisters covered one cameraman in sand till he was underground like a corpse. When they finished their paparazzi sandcastle, they placed a Vitamin Water on his body.

Photos of the incident later ended up on Oh No They Didn't. Looking at the images, it's hard not to be nostalgic for Independence Day 2007. There's something sweet about Hilary playing with a paparazzi, Brody falling in the water becoming a national story, and Lindsay escaping rehab to drink tea at a hotel.

Lindsay, of course, was the star of the blogs. She, and many of her friends and frenemies, dealt with serious substance issues. She was mellow on the weekend, but her past added suspense to her twentysomething escapades. Would she stay calm? Would she keep it family oriented? She made for a high-stakes, serialized tabloid opera.

Her problems weren't funny, but in the absence of much of the chaos of the year, Fourth of July, 2007 brought out the positives of the infamous year. It was the still period between Lindsay's arrest and her career imploding with a DUI incident in late July.

In comparison to reality television star President Donald Trump, who keeps trying to dictate what other people do with their bodies and fetuses, Lindsay and her cohorts seemed like they grew up on a different planet. You would never hear a Lohan telling other women how to live their lives. It'd be nice to return to a world where celebrities rejected rules but also refrained from telling others how to live. Someone should build a time machine to Fourth of July, 2007, so we can all be frozen there forever.