Lily Tomlin

When Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, first appeared on Broadway, I was privileged to attend.  The audience was not only rapt by Tomlin's tour de force, they responded as a single body, sighing and crying and gasping in unison.  I've only had that happen a couple of times in the theatre, when the audience was so synchronized with the performer, so unified.  This was one.

We waited for Tomlin by the stage door.  We were surprised when she emerged with her crew of friends, especially because they looked exactly like some of the crazy people she had just described in her show.  Apparently they were not fictional at all -- like the woman who had shaved her head on one side only and dyed it green -- but the people she really knew.

She and her friends said their hellos and then crawled into their limo.