Darling Lily

Emmy, Tony, and Grammy winner Lily Tomlin turns 81 next Tuesday.

She was born September 1, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan.

Lily Tomlin—who has been married to longtime collaborator Jane Wagner since 2013—has experienced, over the last several years, a career resurgence. This includes Tomlin’s Emmy nominated work on Netflix’s Grace and Frankie—also starring Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston—and she came close to a 2015 Oscar nomination for her performance in Grandma. (Tomlin received a 1975 nomination for Robert Altman’s groundbreaking Nashville.) In 2014, Tomlin was one of the Kennedy Center honorees.

I was thinking of a political comment by Tomlin, which I heard a good forty years ago, which has stayed in my memory after all this time. But, before I quote it, there are more insights by Tomlin which are also worthy.

“Just remember—we’re all in this alone.”

“After all…in private, we’re all misfits.”

“Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.”

“Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”

 — A joke about her relationship with her mother… —

“When I was growing up, my mother told me a lot of things which later turned out not to be true. She told me: … The men in Washington wouldn’t be there if they didn’t know what they were doing.”

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Note to Readers: Beginning next week, on Monday, August 31, 2020, at 06:00 a.m. ET, Progressives Chat blog topic threads will run for a full week. I will address this in the September 21 Progressives Chat.