ISSUE DATE: Mar. 28, 1977
THE BUZZ:
The Lilys go on and on. Down there in the front row is Lupe, the world’s oldest beautician, whose face seems more left than lifted. “Lines, lines, go away,” she says. “Pay a visit to Doris Day.” At the back of the theater, sitting in a wheelchair, is Crystal the Terrible Tumble weed. A quadraplegic, Crystal has been crossing the country in her wheelchair, the CB-equipped Iron Duchess; when last seen, she was on her way to hang-glide off Big Sur, Calif. Swaggering down the aisle, belching and downing a beer at the same time, is Rick, the ex-football bruiser turned singles-bar cruiser. Sitting in the front row is his natural enemy, Mrs. Beasley, the perfect housewife from Calumet City, Ill. Mrs. Beasley’s brain is a pincushion of anxiety. “These days it’s not enough for a housewife to be loving and neat as a pin,” she frets. “We must be creative. There are some things you can make so cleverly that it is virtually impossible for anyone to tell if you have talent or not.”
Lily Tomlin, at age 37, the woman with the kaleidoscopic face, is just about that clever herself. She becomes the embodiment of Edith Ann, Lupe, Rick, Tess and a dozen or so others so quickly and flawlessly that she fools even the pros. “I don’t think Tomlin really acts,” says Robert Benton, who directed her in the year’s sleeper film hit, The Late Show. “Her imagination is so vast that she just assumes the personality of the character.”
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