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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

January 30, 2009

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www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com

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Returning to her roots

Lily Tomlin comes back to the Midwest, and to Ernestine and Edith Ann, in a Cleveland show

by Janet Macoska

Cleveland-If a 20-minute phone conversation with comedian and actress Lily Tomlin is any indication of the laughs Clevelanders will have during her performance at the Palace Theater next week, it would probably be a good idea to rocket on down to the box office now.

Her world is one of observation, characters and concern. Over a 40-year career, she has earned numerous awards, and is currently playing one of the scheming McCluskey sisters on Desperate Housewives. She will also be appearing in the latest Pink Panther film with Steve Martin.

On a cold and snowy Friday, Tomlin called from her home on the West Coast, and immediately added a burst of sunshine. Originally from Detroit, she is looking forward to visiting the area.

"I love all these industrial, working-class cities. I've always thought that Cleveland was more like Detroit than other cities, and always in much better shape than Detroit. The show is an "Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin." We'll do about a dozen characters [favorites like Ernestine and Edith Ann], talk about Cleveland and talk about the new president. Of course, it's not like talking about the old president. Comedians miss him, but I'm over the moon that's he gone." It's obvious that Tomlin truly loves the characters that she brings to life onstage, and continues to let them grow with her.

"I've always loved putting my characters in real situations. I've picketed with telephone workers as Ernestine and then go right back inside and pretend I'm working with the management. She'll do anything. She likes to be the center of attention. What I've done with her most recently is that she's working for a huge health care corporation so that she can deny health care to everyone."

Growing up with her Southern Baptist family in a congested Detroit apartment building was the perfect Petri dish that Tomlin needed to thrive as a creative artist. "My family was Southern, from Kentucky, and we'd go to Kentucky every summer, but I grew up in Detroit's inner city in an old apartment house. It was predominately a black neighborhood, but just seven or eight blocks away were houses that seemed like mansions to me. So I went to school with kids who had some money and others who were pretty poor. In the old apartment house, every apartment was like a microcosm of some ethnicity or educational class or economic class. I was mad for it, just mad for it. In one apartment, there would be a young married couple that I'd always catch in bed."

"I spent all my evenings with Mrs. Rupert, who was a botanist, very eccentric, and her husband worked late for the railroad, so she was alone. She used to empty the garbage in fox furs and a hat, so she was an object of great mystery to all the kids in the building. I was invited into her inner sanctum. She decided that I was the kid who had the most potential to rise above my station. She used to take me shopping every Saturday to the big department store, Hudson's, in downtown Detroit. I'd wear a hat and gloves and carry a purse. It was all funny to me. She was so short, and I was tall and lanky, so we almost looked like girlfriends. We'd go shopping and she'd teach me how to buy linens and fabric. She was teaching me to marry well and run a big house. It taught me how to be a lady."

"The thing that made me laugh most about Mrs. Rupert is before we'd go into Hudson's where we'd stay most of the day because it was a phenomenal department store if it was cold outside, we'd slip up a side street and into an empty doorway to blow our noses so that we'd be composed when we went inside, so that our noses wouldn't be runny. I had a cloth hanky that I kept in my purse, but I would never blow my nose in front of people."

"I had a falling out with Mrs. Rupert when I was twelve, and I never looked back.

She found out that I was doing magic tricks! I was using all my babysitting money to do magic tricks and she was just horrified. This sounds like a joke, but she actually said, 'Don't you know that that's just an illusion? If you're not careful, you're going to end up in show business!'

"I was just so insulted! I was preparing to do a magic show for the Ruperts. Mr. Rupert was home one evening, and I wanted to do my magic show for them. I have a feeling Mr. Rupert would have liked it. She was wonderful though, such a character."

The stage is still Tomlin's favorite medium.

"I love the immediacy and intimacy of it,

the personal aspect of it. You're up there really expressing your own sensibility and somehow validating yourself and your audience, hopefully."

Where does her inspiration come from? Does she carry around notebooks to write down observations?

"Well, my partner Jane [Wagner] is really the brainy one. When she's writing a show, like when she was writing The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, I became the hunter and gatherer. I'd walk around the house looking for any scrap of paper that she may have written on. Very often, that's how I'd find some of the best lines. She'd written it and put it down and didn't even bother to pick it up. So I did, and quickly took possession of it. I try to tell her it's collaborative."

We're trying to get them sent to sanctuaries because elephants cannot live in zoos. They die in zoos. They have a premature life span. They cannot live in a confined space. They have to have hundreds and hundreds of acres to roam. There's a great sanctuary in Northern California called PAWS [Performing Animal Welfare Society] and a great one called the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary. We've been trying to get Billy, the sole bull elephant at the L.A. zoo, to a sanctuary as well as Jennie, an elephant with many health problems, who is currently at the zoo in Dallas."

"Elephants in captivity, in zoos or circuses, get horrible foot diseases and joint

BRETT PATTERSON

problems from standing on hard surfaces, and in an area as small as a three-car garage. Elephants are a matriarchal society and roam in herds. They're very intelligent and they suffer terribly in zoos and in circuses. The sanctuaries are as close to their living in the wild as possible."

Tomlin has also been working for universal health care in California. A bill has been passed twice by the legislature and vetoed twice by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In a unique collaboration with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, the Lily Tomlin-Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center was established and is thriving. All proceeds from ticket sales go to providing health services for HIV-positive people.

One piece of juicy news that will delight Tomlin's fans is that she and actress Kathryn

McCluskey sister, are conjuring up a way to continue that magic relationship by developing a new series that will feature them as detectives.

Both Tomlin and Wagner post on a newlyJoosten, her fellow Desperate Housewives launched website for women, www.WOWOWOW.com, which also boasts participation by celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Candice Bergen, Leslie Stahl, Liz Smith and others.

"Jane and I post on it. I'm not very reliable. I end up mostly making videos for it. My most recently posting is a video from a press conference we did a few days ago in Los Angeles. I've been advocating for elephants here in L.A. and for another elephant in Dallas.

Treat yourself to "An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin" on Thursday, February 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Palace Theatre in Playhouse Square. For tickets or for more information, go to www.playhousesquare.com or call 216241-6000.