Lily Tomlin

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Anyone who saw the now-infamous YouTube videos of Lily Tomlin and director David O. Russell melting down on the set of I Heart Huckabees can understand why Tomlin would prefer to work on stage—or maybe even give up on Hollywood completely. But it didn’t take a demanding film auteur to make the multiple-Tony-award-winning comedienne appreciate live performance.

“I like the stage best of all, and that’s what I would do if I could do nothing else,” Tomlin told me last year. “I guess I’ll do it ’til I drop.”

Though she’s never really stopped touring in a career that spans over three decades, Tomlin’s most recent shows have been a comeback—not for her, but for many of the characters she’s created over the years. “An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin” is not a stage show like her Broadway hit "The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," but a retrospective of multiple personalities.

“It’s a compilation of characters I’ve done for the last 30 years. It’s pretty informal,” she says. “I fancy that some of them are classic.”

History is on her side; her creations have had a way of winding their way into the public consciousness—or just outright exploding overnight. That was pretty much the case with the two characters that launched her career: the five-year-old Edith Ann, and the abrasive telephone operator Ernestine.

After Tomlin joined the groundbreaking sketch comedy show Laugh-In in 1969, Ernestine in particular practically defined the kind of stardom that would later become a template for comedians on Saturday Night Live: an oddball character with one or more quotable catchphrases—in Ernestine’s case, lines like “have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?” and “one ringy dingy, two ringy dingy”—who becomes the talk of workplace watercoolers everywhere.

To this day, Tomlin doesn’t really know what hit her. “How could I get so lucky with that character?” she wonders. “She really is one of those serendipitous things, you don’t know how they happen.” - Steve Palopoli sanjose.com

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