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Lily Tomlin Still Rolling As 70 Closes In

Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center

Comedian Lily Tomlin, now approaching 70, is as busy as ever.

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By CURTIS ROSS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 12, 2009

The mention of her upcoming 70th birthday seems to give Lily Tomlin a mild shock.

It's not that she has problems with it. "It just sounds so startling when you say it," she says from West Palm Beach. "I mean, I can't quite grasp it."

Anyone who associates age 70 with slowing down would have trouble grasping it as well.

Tomlin is as busy as ever, currently on the big screen in "The Pink Panther 2" and on the small one in "Desperate Housewives." She's also touring with a show called "An Evening With Lily Tomlin."

The show features some of her best-known characters, such as telephone operator Ernestine and precocious 5-year-old Edith Ann. Sort of like "Lily Tomlin's Greatest Hits," then?

"Kind of," she says. "You'd have to be a pretty hardcore fan to know all of them.

"I do try to keep them relevant," she says. A review of a performance last year noted that Ernestine now answered calls for a health care provider.

Tomlin is best known for her characters, something she attributes in part to the neighbors in the Detroit apartment house where she was reared.

The neighborhood was "becoming downwardly mobile," Tomlin says, and her neighbors included factory workers and retired teachers, conservatives and radicals, the educated and the uneducated.

"They were just fascinating. I was madly in love with them," Tomlin says. "There was a huge range of humanity."

Living in a predominantly black neighborhood and spending summers visiting her parents' families in Kentucky provided more inspiration, and some shocks.

"I was just amazed how badly they would behave," Tomlin says. "I began to understand how people can be, I won't say ignorant, but they're conditioned by everything around them."

One constant in Tomlin's life is Jane Wagner, her professional and romantic partner since the early '70s. Some couples complete each other's sentences. Tomlin finishes Wagner's manuscripts.

"We have such a similar sensibility," Tomlin says. "I understand her work and I can sense where she's headed.

"She's not gonna deliver you these clean typewritten things. It will have all these notes in the margins and things crossed out," Tomlin says. "I can read those notations. I'm basically her typist."

IN TOWN

Lily Tomlin

WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday

WHERE: Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Morsani Hall, 1010 N. MacInnes Place, Tampa; (813) 229-7827

COST: $25.50, $35.50 and $45.50

Reporter Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568.

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