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Tomlin picks up characters nearly everywhere. Sister Boogie Woman, for instance, was the idea of New York Novelist Cynthia Buchanan (Maiden). Crystal, the quadraplegic, stretches the limits of humor, but the notion came from a fan, the mother of a crippled child, who thought it would be "terrifically inspiring" for the handicapped if Lily did one of them. The woman even furnished one of Crystal's best lines: "At an amusement park a little kid asked me if I was a ride." Lupe, the world's oldest beautician, is modeled after the late Helena Rubinstein.
Like any good parent, Lily claims to love all her characters equally, but she admits that Ernestine is first among them. Why? The answer is surprising. "Doing Ernestine is really a very sexual experience. I just squeeze myself very tight from the face down. The bottom line with Ernestine is that she's a very sensual person," says Lily, who herself moves with the free, confident grace of a dancer. "She's a woman who knows she has a very appealing body and likes to show it off."
All of Tomlin's characters reflect one or another of her chameleon shades. Some emerge straight out of a working-class background and her memories of growing up amid the plastic totems of the '50s. Indeed, everything about the '50s seems to have a kind of magic for her, and in conversation, as well as her act, she returns to those years, as if drawn by a magnet of nostalgia. Lily's family came from the Kentucky hill country, but like many impoverished Southerners, her parents moved north to Detroit during the Depression. She was born there in 1939 and named Mary Jean. Her father Guy became a toolmaker in a brass factory, where he prided himself on being able to devise any tool his bosses needed; often he would bring them home to show "Babe," as he called her. Says Lily: "I was about 15 when I visited the factory where my father had worked for 35 years. I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that he could have worked there ten hours a day, under such terrible conditions. The noise was so deafening."
Gradually Guy drank more and more. Lily would go with him to the neighborhood bars, where he would make her sing. He was proud of her, constantly encouraging her to "show out" and display her flair for the dramatic.
Lillie Mae, her mother, whose name she eventually took, had a more placid disposition. But almost from the minute they finished with diapers, she found herself unable to control Lily and her brother Richard, who was four years younger. One day Lily and Richard decided that the living-room sofa would look better as a sectional. Practical kids, they picked up a saw and divided it into three pieces.
"My parents would go to bed," Lily recalls, "and Richard and I would stay up till 2 in the morning. Richard, who was 13 or so then, would put on a satin smoking jacket, light a cigarette and march around with a glass of something. I really think Mother sensed that we might take a stick to her if she didn't stop telling us what to do. So she decided to stop mothering." Lillie Mae, who returned to Kentucky after Guy died in 1973, says simply: "Lily was always a stubborn child, and I went along with a lot of things other mothers didn't."