August
26, 1939
Announcer Red
Barber called the game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at
Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York.
At the time, television was still in its infancy. Regular programming
did not yet exist, and very few people owned television sets--there were only
about 400 in the New York area.
Not until 1946 did regular network broadcasting
catch on in the United States, and only in
the mid-1950s did television sets
become more common in the American household.
In 1939, the World's Fair--which was being held in New
York--became the catalyst for the historic broadcast. The television was one of
fair’s prize exhibits, and organizers believed that the Dodgers-Reds
doubleheader on August 26 was the perfect event to showcase America's grasp on
the new technology.
August 27, 1964
The pair launched a TV series that ran from 1950 to
1958, and they appeared in more than a dozen movies during their 35-year career
together in what became one of the most successful and beloved comedy acts in
history. Allen retired after a mild heart attack in 1958. After her death,
Burns visited her grave once a month while continuing to work in TV, theater,
nightclubs, and movies. He wrote many books, including Gracie: A Love Story,
a tribute to his wife. Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.
September 1, 1939
Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she
began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in. Her career has spanned television, comedy
recordings, Broadway, and motion pictures, enjoying acclaimed success in each
medium. She has won many awards including Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award and has also been nominated for an Academy Award. Tomlin's humor is often sharp and insightful in the
traditions of standup comedians, but also frequently endearing, slightly wacky,
and generally quite "family friendly" in the tradition of television
comediennes such as Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Eve Arden.
In 1969, after a brief stint as a hostess on the ABC Television series Music Scene, Tomlin
joined NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Tomlin was
an instant success on the already established program, in which in addition to
appearing in general sketches and delivering comic gags, she began appearing as
regular characters she created that quickly became famous and went on to lives
outside of the show in later recordings and television specials:
- Ernestine was a nosy,
condescending telephone operator who generally treated customers with
little sympathy. Ernestine often snorted when she let loose a barbed
response or heard something salacious; she also wore her hair in a 1940s
hairstyle with a hair net, although the character was contemporary.
Ernestine was almost always at her switchboard taking calls in the
sketches. She occasionally called her boyfriend, Vito, a telephone repair
man, or her pal Phoenicia, another operator.
- Edith Ann is a
precocious five-and-a-half year old girl who waxes philosophical on
everyday life, either about life as a kid or things for which she feels
she has the answers although she is too young to fully understand. She
often ends her monologues with "And that's the truth,"
punctuating it with a noisy raspberry. Edith Ann sits in an over-sized
rocking chair (to make Tomlin seem child-sized) with her rag doll, Doris,
and often talks of life at home with her battling parents and bullying
older sister, Mary Jean (Lily Tomlin's actual first name). Edith Ann has
an over-sized, playfully aggressive dog named Buster and a boyfriend named
Junior Phillips, a possibly unrequited love. (No one but Edith and
"Doris" are seen in any of the Edith Ann sketches.)
- Mrs. Judith Beasley,
also known as "The Tasteful Lady", is a somewhat prudish and
prissy, conservatively dressed middle-aged apolitical woman who dispenses
advice on gracious living and a life of elegance.
- Susie the Sorority Girl
is a blonde collegiate who could be the Tasteful Lady's daughter.
Humorless and melodramatic, her biggest worries are the likes of who took
her missing album by The Carpenters.
- The Consumer Advocate Lady
is a dour, austere woman who rigidly inspects and tests products for their
alleged value. The Consumer Advocate Lady is something of a variation of
Mrs. Beasley, much like Tomlin's "male vocalist" characters
Tommy Velour and Pervis Hawkins.
Tomlin was also one of the first female comedians to
break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. In 1982, she
premiered Pervis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after
Luther
Vandross), with a mustache, beard and
close-cropped afro
hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little, if any,
skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, instead depending on stage
lighting to create the effect.
Tomlin met her partner Jane Wagner in 1971. After watching an after school special
written by Wagner, Tomlin invited her to Los Angeles to collaborate on a comedy
album. Although Tomlin officially came out to the press in 2001, her sexual
orientation has not really been a secret; in interviews she would often refer
to Jane Wagner as her partner. As Tomlin herself stated in 2008, in an
interview for Just Out magazine: "Everybody in the industry was
certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane... In interviews I always reference
Jane and talk about Jane, but they don't always write about it."
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
August
26, 1939
First
televised Major League baseball game on station W2XBS (the station that was
to become WNBC-TV).
Announcer Red
Barber called the game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at
Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York.
At the time, television was still in its infancy. Regular programming
did not yet exist, and very few people owned television sets--there were only
about 400 in the New York area.
In 1939, the World's Fair--which was being held in New
York--became the catalyst for the historic broadcast. The television was one of
fair’s prize exhibits, and organizers believed that the Dodgers-Reds
doubleheader on August 26 was the perfect event to showcase America's grasp on
the new technology.
By today's standards, the video coverage was somewhat
crude. There were only two stationary camera angles: The first was placed down
the third base line to pick up infield throws to first, and the second was
placed high above home plate to get an extensive view of the field. It was also
difficult to capture fast-moving plays: Swinging bats looked like paper fans,
and the ball was all but invisible during pitches and hits.
Nevertheless, the experiment was a success, driving
interest in the development of television technology, particularly for sporting
events. Though baseball owners were initially concerned that televising
baseball would sap actual attendance, they soon warmed to the idea, and the
possibilities for revenue generation that came with increased exposure of the
game, including the sale of rights to air certain teams or games and television
advertising.
Today, televised sports is a multi-billion dollar
industry, with technology that gives viewers an astounding amount of visual and
audio detail. Cameras are now so precise that they can capture the way a ball
changes shape when struck by a bat, and athletes are wired to pick up
field-level and sideline conversation.
August 27, 1964
Comedian
Gracie Allen died. Burns and Allen
started performing a successful vaudeville act in the early 1920s and married
in 1926.
In 1932, they first appeared on the popular radio program The Guy
Lombardo Show. Audiences loved Allen's gentle, ditzy character, and CBS
launched a half-hour show, The Adventures of Gracie, in 1934. Renamed
The Burns and Allen Show in 1936, the radio show ran until 1950, achieving Top
10 ratings almost continually.
The pair launched a TV series that ran from 1950 to
1958, and they appeared in more than a dozen movies during their 35-year career
together in what became one of the most successful and beloved comedy acts in
history. Allen retired after a mild heart attack in 1958. After her death,
Burns visited her grave once a month while continuing to work in TV, theater,
nightclubs, and movies. He wrote many books, including Gracie: A Love Story,
a tribute to his wife. Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.
September 1, 1939
Mary Jean
"Lily" Tomlin is born.
Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she
began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in. Her career has spanned television, comedy
recordings, Broadway, and motion pictures, enjoying acclaimed success in each
medium. She has won many awards including Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award and has also been nominated for an Academy Award. Tomlin's humor is often sharp and insightful in the
traditions of standup comedians, but also frequently endearing, slightly wacky,
and generally quite "family friendly" in the tradition of television
comediennes such as Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Eve Arden.
Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford), a housewife
and nurse's aide, and Guy Tomlin, a factory worker. Tomlin's parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. She is a 1957 graduate of Cass
Technical High School. Tomlin
attended Wayne
State University, where her interest
in the theater and performing arts began. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City.
Her first television appearance was on The
Merv Griffin Show in 1965.
In 1969, after a brief stint as a hostess on the ABC Television series Music Scene, Tomlin
joined NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Tomlin was
an instant success on the already established program, in which in addition to
appearing in general sketches and delivering comic gags, she began appearing as
regular characters she created that quickly became famous and went on to lives
outside of the show in later recordings and television specials:
- Ernestine was a nosy,
condescending telephone operator who generally treated customers with
little sympathy. Ernestine often snorted when she let loose a barbed
response or heard something salacious; she also wore her hair in a 1940s
hairstyle with a hair net, although the character was contemporary.
Ernestine was almost always at her switchboard taking calls in the
sketches. She occasionally called her boyfriend, Vito, a telephone repair
man, or her pal Phoenicia, another operator.
- Edith Ann is a
precocious five-and-a-half year old girl who waxes philosophical on
everyday life, either about life as a kid or things for which she feels
she has the answers although she is too young to fully understand. She
often ends her monologues with "And that's the truth,"
punctuating it with a noisy raspberry. Edith Ann sits in an over-sized
rocking chair (to make Tomlin seem child-sized) with her rag doll, Doris,
and often talks of life at home with her battling parents and bullying
older sister, Mary Jean (Lily Tomlin's actual first name). Edith Ann has
an over-sized, playfully aggressive dog named Buster and a boyfriend named
Junior Phillips, a possibly unrequited love. (No one but Edith and
"Doris" are seen in any of the Edith Ann sketches.)
- Mrs. Judith Beasley,
also known as "The Tasteful Lady", is a somewhat prudish and
prissy, conservatively dressed middle-aged apolitical woman who dispenses
advice on gracious living and a life of elegance.
- Susie the Sorority Girl
is a blonde collegiate who could be the Tasteful Lady's daughter.
Humorless and melodramatic, her biggest worries are the likes of who took
her missing album by The Carpenters.
- The Consumer Advocate Lady
is a dour, austere woman who rigidly inspects and tests products for their
alleged value. The Consumer Advocate Lady is something of a variation of
Mrs. Beasley, much like Tomlin's "male vocalist" characters
Tommy Velour and Pervis Hawkins.
Tomlin was also one of the first female comedians to
break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. In 1982, she
premiered Pervis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after
Luther
Vandross), with a mustache, beard and
close-cropped afro
hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little, if any,
skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, instead depending on stage
lighting to create the effect.
Ernestine and Edith Ann were by far Tomlin's most
popular characters, and she occasionally performed as them in various
television programs over the years.
AT&T offered Tomlin US$500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a
commercial, but she declined, saying it would compromise her artistic
integrity. In 1976 she appeared as Ernestine in a parody of a commercial on Saturday
Night Live (Season 2 Episode 1,
September 18, 1976), in which she proclaimed, "We don't care, we don't
have to...we're the phone company." The character later made a guest
appearance at The
Superhighway Summit at UCLA, January 11,
1994, interrupting a speech being given on the information
superhighway by then-Vice President Al Gore. In 2003, she made two commercials as Ernestine for WebEx.
Tomlin brought Edith Ann to the forefront again in the
1990s with three animated prime-time television specials and also publishing
Edith Ann's "autobiography" My Life (co-written by Jane Wagner) in 1995.
Tomlin released her first comedy album on Polydor Records in 1971, This Is A Recording,
an album of Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone. The album hit
#15 on the Billboard
Hot 200, becoming (and remaining as
of 2011) the highest-charting album ever by a solo comedienne. She would earn a
Grammy award that year for Best
Comedy Recording.
Tomlin's second album, 1972's And
That's The Truth, a collection of
monologues as Edith Ann, was nearly as successful, peaking at #41 on the chart
and earning another Grammy nomination. (Tomlin has two of the three top
charting female comedy albums on Billboard, sandwiching a 1983 Joan Rivers release.)
Tomlin's third comedy album, 1975's Modern Scream,
a parody of movie magazines and celebrity interviews features her performing as
multiple characters, including Ernestine, Edith Ann, Judith, and Suzie. Her
1977 release Lily Tomlin On Stage, was an adaptation of her Broadway
show that year. Each of these albums earned Tomlin additional Grammy
nominations.
Tomlin made her dramatic debut in Robert Altman's Nashville, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she played Linnea Reese, a straitlaced,
gospel-singing, mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a womanizing
country singer (played by Keith Carradine). The Oscar that year went to Lee Grant for her role in Shampoo. A comedy-mystery, The
Late Show, teaming Tomlin with Art Carney, was a critical success in 1977. One of the few
widely panned projects of Tomlin's career, however, was 1978's Moment by Moment, directed and written by Wagner, which teamed Tomlin
in a cross-generational older woman/younger man romance with John Travolta.
Tomlin soon had the greatest hit of her film career
with 1980's Nine to Five in which she played a secretary named Violet Newstead who joins coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in seeking revenge on their monstrous boss, Franklin
M. Hart, Jr., played by Dabney Coleman. The film was a huge success and one of the year's
top grossing films. Tomlin then starred in the 1981 science fiction comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a send-up of consumerism, and was the sickly heiress
in the comedy All
of Me opposite Steve Martin.
Tomlin and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched
at birth in the 1989 comedy Big
Business. Tomlin also played
chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott in Altman's 1993 ensemble film Short Cuts, and, in two films by director David O. Russell; she appeared as a peacenik Raku artist in Flirting with Disaster
and later, as an existential detective in I ♥ Huckabees. In 2007, a
video recording surfaced showing Tomlin and Russell in a heated exchange over
the shooting of a scene in Huckabees.
She collaborated again with director Robert Altman in
what would prove to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion,
playing Rhonda Johnson, one half of a middle-aged Midwestern singing duo with Meryl Streep.
Tomlin was the first woman to appear solo in a Broadway show with her premiere of Appearing Nitely at the Biltmore
theatre in April 1977. The same month, she made the cover of Time magazine with the headline "America's New Queen of Comedy".
Her solo show then toured the country and was made into a record album titled On
Stage. In 1985, Tomlin starred in another one-woman Broadway show The
Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by her
long-time life partner, writer/producer Jane Wagner. The show won her a Tony Award, and was made into a feature film in 1991. Tomlin revived the show for a run on
Broadway in 2000 which then toured the country through mid-2002. In 1989, she
won the Sarah
Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.
Tomlin voiced Ms. Frizzle on the animated television series The Magic School Bus
from 1994 to 1997. Also, in the 1990s, Tomlin appeared on the popular sitcom Murphy Brown as the title character's boss. In 2005 and 2006, she
had a recurring role as Will Truman's boss Margot on Will & Grace. She appeared on the dramatic series The West Wing for four years (2002–2006) in the recurring role of
presidential secretary Deborah Fiderer.
In the 2008-2009 fifth season of Desperate
Housewives she has a recurring
role as Roberta, the sister of Mrs. McCluskey (played by Kathryn Joosten, who coincidentally had played Tomlin's secretarial
predecessor on The West Wing). During the 2008 Emmy Awards, Tomlin appeared as part of a tribute to the
influential 1960s television series Laugh-In. Tomlin voiced Tammy in the
2005 The Simpsons episode, "The
Last of the Red Hat Mamas".
Tomlin provided a voice for the film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which was released in August 2009.
Since its launch in 2008, Tomlin has been a
contributor for wowOwow.com, a website for women to talk culture, politics and gossip.
Tomlin and Kathryn Joosten have been in talks to star in a Desperate
Housewives spin-off, which was given the green light in May 2009. But has
later been scrapped due to Kathryn's both on screen death and real life death
in 2012. Tomlin premiered her one-woman show Not Playing with a Full Deck
at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in November 2009. It was her first appearance in that city, though she
did tape an Emmy-winning TV special, a spoof of Las Vegas called Lily: Sold
Out which premiered on CBS in January 1981. Tomlin guest-starred as Marilyn
Tobin in the third season of Damages and in an episode of NCIS in the episode, "The Penelope Papers",
playing Agent Timothy McGee's Sean
Murray grandmother, Penelope
Langston. Tomlin is set to star in Reba McEntire's new TV series Malibu Country as Reba's character's mother Lillie Mae. On May 11th
Reba tweeted that ABC has picked up the series and will start shooting in
August, which is set to air in mid to late November.
In 2012, Tomlin guest starred on the HBO series Eastbound
and Down. Appearing as Tammy Powers,
mother of Kenny Powers, the show's main character, Tomlin appeared in three
episodes of Season 3. It is unknown if she will reprise the role for the show's
upcoming 4th season.
Tomlin met her partner Jane Wagner in 1971. After watching an after school special
written by Wagner, Tomlin invited her to Los Angeles to collaborate on a comedy
album. Although Tomlin officially came out to the press in 2001, her sexual
orientation has not really been a secret; in interviews she would often refer
to Jane Wagner as her partner. As Tomlin herself stated in 2008, in an
interview for Just Out magazine: "Everybody in the industry was
certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane... In interviews I always reference
Jane and talk about Jane, but they don't always write about it."
Tomlin has been involved in a number of feminist and gay-friendly film productions, and on her 1975 album Modern
Scream she poked fun at straight actors who make a point of distancing
themselves from their gay and lesbian characters—answering the pseudo-interview
question, she replied: "How did it feel to play a heterosexual? I've seen
these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk ..."
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
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