Lily Tomlin will ring in the fun at Westbury
Photo credit: Handout | FRIDAY: RINGY-DINGY
Award-winning comedian Lily Tomlin performs a one-woman stand-up show at 8 p.m. at The Theatre at Westbury. Admission: $55-$70. Info at 877-598-8694, livenation.com.
Lily Tomlin as her classic child character "Edith
George Carlin and Richard Pryor are gone, and the late Lenny Bruce is a distant memory. Among comedy's few remaining icons is Lily Tomlin - the four-time Emmy, two-time Tony and onetime Grammy Award winner, and Oscar nominee ("Nashville") who is known to generations for "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" (1960s-'70s), "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" (1980s), the animated children's series "The Magic School Bus" (1990s), "Desperate Housewives" (2000s), among other credits. Tomlin, 70, plays the Theatre at Westbury tomorrow at 8 p.m.
I understand you might have a "Desperate Housewives" spinoff, starring yourself and Kathryn Joosten as Roberta and Karen McCluskey.
We're working on that. I do know it's being developed - that there's a writer developing it, and there's interest in it. You never know what's gonna happen, but we're excited about it. We love the idea, playing some kind of off-the-wall investigators (laughs) just like we were on the show!
And you're guest-starring on the third season of FX's "Damages"?
I've already shot a couple of episodes. I'll be shooting another one at the end of November, probably right after I go to Westbury.
What can the Westbury audience expect?
I'll probably do 10 or 12 characters, interact with the audience, talk about Westbury and the area, and a little bit about what's going on for all of us in the world. I usually do a Q&A at the end, just to horse around, and that's really off the cuff and lots of fun.
The referendum vote in Maine, overturning the legislature's approval of gay marriage, must have been disappointing.
It was. I did a robocall for it. Glenn also did a robocall for it. It was surprising, what happened in Maine. I can understand Texas or someplace that makes an amendment to their constitution, but Maine is pretty surprising. There're enough people in the world who just absolutely are threatened - they're shaken, they will not tolerate it, they will not have anything change. Why it is so important, I just don't know, but they find it threatening. Things will change in time.
What was it like to be inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1998? I assume they don't hold the ceremony during winter!
Well, if they had, I would've been used to it! Anything is great. I started seeing Jeff Daniels, all the stuff he's been doing for Michigan, and I thought, "I don't help my poor old state enough, I should do something." Especially Detroit, where it's so depressed and not doing great.
Talk about imprinted memories - those are my imprinted memories, all those years in Detroit, growing up and living in that old apartment house. I know that's why I do what I do, because I was crazy for all my neighbors there. Such a range of people, there you wouldn't believe it - they came from psychology, education, economics, politics. I was just fascinated to go from apartment to apartment and I would just play the room! I had an act from the time I was about 10 years old. I put shows on in my back porch or in the garage and hung my mother's sheets to make curtains, and went all over the apartment house to try to get other kids to be in the show. Of course, they wouldn't show up for rehearsal, or they'd leave in the middle of the show [laughs] and I was just devastated!
What kind of apartment house was it?
It was just a great big old apartment house that had 40 apartments in it. At one time it had been a nice, middle-class building before the neighborhood changed. There were older people living there who were professionals but they couldn't move because they were on a fixed income, and then other people started coming, in like my mom and dad, who came as a young couple from Kentucky. My dad came up North to work. He never wanted my mother to work although she started working when I was about 12, as a nurse's aide.
It became a predominantly black neighborhood in no time, and so I had lots of black friends and went to their houses and went to school with them and they came to my house and I would be dumbfounded later in life when I'd run into people, like, from Tulsa, Okla., and they didn't even know a black person. It was just amazing that people can lead such insular lives.
One of my own imprinted memories was the 1969 afterschool special "J.T.," which your partner, Jane Wagner, wrote, about an African-American schoolboy in Harlem. It won a Peabody Award and I think CBS even then ran it in prime time. It's never been on video, and that's such a shame.
It played [on TV] for about 25 years, from '69 forward, around the holidays, but it doesn't play anymore. Every so often I'll run into black directors, young directors, and they'll say how it influenced their lives. I remember John Singleton particularly, he just was over the moon about it from being a little boy and seeing J.T. That's the first thing [Wagner] ever wrote - she really wanted to be a songwriter, and she'd written a long song about a kid in "The Traffic Jam of Life," as it was called. And our agent said, "Why don't you turn this into a screenplay?" She wrote it for afterschool programming for CBS, but it was so critically received back then that they aired it in prime time and she won a Peabody and it played for years and years around the holidays.
WHO Lily Tomlin
WHEN | WHERE Tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Theatre at Westbury
TICKETS $55-$70
INFO 516-334-0800, livenation.com
