Lily Tomlin has always been a character, going back to her childhood in Detroit when she was putting on shows on her porch for her family and the neighborhood kids. But many more live inside her.
There’s Mrs. Judith Beasley, a housewife from Calumet City, Ill., who always knows the best products to buy. The pugnacious phone company operator Ernestine. Precocious 5½-year-old Edith Ann, who contemplates life from a giant rocking chair. Those are just the staples. When Tomlin performs at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford Oct. 20-21, she could draw from a dozen more.
“I do a lot of first-person,” she says of her live shows. “And I do Lud and Marie. They’re patterned after my mother and father. I do Madame Lupe, because she’s such an old, early character.”
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