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Lily Tomlin in Full Flower

A fund-raiser for the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center on Saturday had Coco Peru holding a two-hour heart-to-heart with Lily Tomlin about the lesbian star's sublime career (and Dolly Parton's wig).


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“Gay people don’t have an excuse to be square,” Lily Tomlin told Coco Peru on Saturday night at “Conversations With Coco,” a fund-raiser for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. At the event, fittingly held at the Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center in Hollywood (named for the star and her partner), Clinton Leupp’s alter ego talked Tomlin through her 45-year career in film, on television, and on Broadway ... and Tomlin proved that discussing your Emmys and Tonys with a famous drag queen is about as far from square as it gets.

Entering the simple stage set — two chairs, a table, and some flowers — Tomlin looked chic and youthful, her jet-black hair matching her leather jacket, slim pants, and high-heeled boots. Exposing a bit of vanity, she complained lightheartedly about her “sidelight” and fussed with her pants all night to make sure they weren’t riding up.

Her first job on camera actually involved a play on her beauty — on a short-lived revival of TheGarry Moore Show in 1966, Tomlin is seen in front of a mirror as a stagehand informs her she has two minutes before showtime. She brushes her hair, applies mascara, and announces she’s now groomed and gorgeous enough for the cameras. Then she pulls a gorilla mask over her head. Even though the skit was cut, Tomlin’s delivery of her aborted debut didn’t miss a beat.

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Quick to laugh and full of stories, Tomlin talked up her Detroit childhood, which included several sojourns to visit relatives in Kentucky. Her brother fancied himself a playboy, drinking water out of martini glasses, while she and her cousins would eat cobs of corn thrown on the floor by her mother (Tomlin’s next project should be a Running With Scissors/Me Talk Pretty One Day anthology).

Clips of Tomlin’s characters on Laugh-In, which she joined in its third season in late ’69, were projected on a giant screen, including Suzy Sorority and, of course, impish Edith Ann and the snorting phone operator Ernestine. She described Ernestine’s power trips and facial tics as signs of a repressed sexual beast within. Tomlin spoke of the most memorable characters she created for Laugh-In and her television specials — including the male lounge singer Tommy Velour and the R&B crooner Pervis Hawkins — like friends she hadn’t seen in a while, describing them as you would a high school boyfriend or college professor (Hawkins was a “cool cat” and Ernestine “really loved herself”).

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