Six-Year-Old Lindsay Shows Up as Stuff Found on the D Train Floor
Before The Parent Trap, before Mean Girls, before the red carpets and the tabloid years and the full-circle Hollywood comeback, there was six-year-old Lindsay Lohan standing in David Letterman’s fake living room dressed as — in Dave’s words — “stuff found on the floor of the D Train.”
The clip aired on October 29, 1992 — 34 years ago — during Late Night with David Letterman’s annual Halloween costume bit. Lindsay had turned six just a few months earlier, making the footage an almost impossibly early time capsule from the beginning of her career. Letterman opens the segment by cycling through a parade of gloriously ridiculous trick-or-treat costumes — a rotting jack-o’-lantern, a stun gun, a bug-covered windshield and more — before young Lindsay walks in carrying what looks like half of New York’s subway floor on her costume.
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Letterman asks her name — “Lindsay” — and then what her favorite trick-or-treat snack is. Her answer is gum. Dave, naturally, responds by giving her 40 feet of garden hose. She takes the thing, tries to maneuver it out, briefly turns the exit into its own little comedy routine and somehow never looks rattled.
That is what makes the footage so good now. She is tiny, completely matter-of-fact and already weirdly comfortable in the middle of a television gag. There is no big star entrance because there is no star yet — just a six-year-old kid named Lindsay doing the bit and moving on while Letterman keeps the segment rolling.
And the early-’90s details are immaculate. The joke depends on everyone instantly understanding that the floor of a New York subway car is its own ecosystem. The “treats” Letterman hands the kids include chewing tobacco, a meat thermometer, a highway road flare and airplane headphones. Somewhere between the house set, Paul Shaffer, the audience applause and the cheap Halloween props, the whole thing becomes pure 1992 late-night television preserved in amber.
There is another future teen-movie connection hiding in the same Halloween tradition, too: Lacey Chabert, years before she and Lindsay would share the screen in Mean Girls, also appeared in Letterman’s Halloween costume segments. When Lindsay returned to Letterman in 2013, the pair even looked back at her 1992 appearance together.
Watch Six-Year-Old Lindsay Lohan on David Letterman in 1992
The Halloween segment aired October 29, 1992, when Lindsay Lohan was six years old — 34 years before this feature.
Sources: Letterman / YouTube; epguides; DDY’s Late Show with David Letterman Fan Page. Lead image restored by INYIM Media; gallery images are from the embedded Letterman video.
