Word: tomlin
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...gracious hello." (Snort, snort.) "This is installation and repair service, Miss Tomlin speaking clearly into her mouthpiece. Who's calling, please. The A.M.A.? What's that stand for, Anna Maria Alberghetti? Oh, don't get so uptight. It's just a little joke. Not unlike Medicare...
...Tomlin picks up characters nearly everywhere. Sister Boogie Woman, for instance, was the idea of New York Novelist Cynthia Buchanan (Maiden). Crystal, the quadraplegic, stretches the limits of humor, but the notion came from a fan, the mother of a crippled child, who thought it would be "terrifically inspiring" for the handicapped if Lily did one of them. The woman even furnished one of Crystal's best lines: "At an amusement park a little kid asked me if I was a ride." Lupe, the world's oldest beautician, is modeled after the late Helena Rubinstein...
...Tomlin's characters reflect one or another of her chameleon shades. Some emerge straight out of a working-class background and her memories of growing up amid the plastic totems of the '50s. Indeed, everything about the '50s seems to have a kind of magic for her, and in conversation, as well as her act, she returns to those years, as if drawn by a magnet of nostalgia. Lily's family came from the Kentucky hill country, but like many impoverished Southerners, her parents moved north to Detroit during the Depression. She was born there...
...kids were immediately imitating Ernestine's "Is this the party to whom I am speaking?" the way they said "dyno-mite" like Good Times' Jimmy Walker last year. Schlatter left Laugh-In in 1972, and the show, reflecting the strait-laced Nixon years, had less room for Tomlin's wild, irreverent humor. Before it folded in 1973, she was suing NBC to be released...
Both CBS and ABC hired her for specials, with the possibility of a regular show, but the Sixth Avenue hot-shots ran nervously for their Di-Gel every time she appeared on the screen. Tomlin, went the word, was not safe-something Lily could have told them at the start. Says she: "Commercial television specializes in escapist fantasy. I deal with culture reality." Adds Jane Wagner, who co-produced two of the TV specials: "The network bosses think Lily is a genius, but they are also scared to death...