YPSILANTI – Award-winning comedian and actress Lily Tomlin will grace the stage at Pease Auditorium at Eastern Michigan University for a performance of "classic" Tomlin on Saturday, Oct. 1.
For a minimum $100 donation to EMU's Stonewall Scholarship fund, audience members can attend a special afterglow reception following the show.
Tomlin, who was born in Detroit, is well known for her host of quirky characters, including the entire cast of her Tony-award winning one woman Broadway show "The Search for Intelligent Signs of Life in the Universe" written by her life-partner Jane Wagner and her sketches on TV's "Laugh-In," including the wisecracking telephone operator Ernestine ("Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?") and five-year-old Edith Ann in the oversized rocking chair ("And that's the truth!").
She has also appeared on TV shows like "Murphy Brown" and "West Wing."
Tomlin has had many memorable movie roles including "Nine to Five," "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" and the recent "I (heart) Huckabees."
Tomlin's stand-up act has generated one liners that have settled deep into the public's collective conscience like "Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs" and "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
"I always did observations," Tomlin told BTL last year. "There were so few women doing standup or that kind of comedy [when I started out] – but generally people had a persona, a straight, flat out stand-up persona that they sort of fictionalized their lives. … I was just much more interested in different kinds of people. People would say, 'you're so regular, there's nothing eccentric about your personality,' … and they would say to me, 'Too bad you don't have a funny voice or something,' and I would say, 'Well I don't, but the characters do.' And anyway, from growing up in Detroit in a very mixed neighborhood with all kinds of people in an old apartment house, I was just more amused and sort of madly in love actually with all these different kinds of people. And they all had something to say or feel or be, or they were funny in their own individual way." (Read the full June 2004 interview with Lily Tomlin, "Lily Tomlin, an icon unto herself" online at https://www.pridesource.com/article.shtml?article=8208).
Lily Tomlin comes to EMU Oct. 1
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