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Attention, Diners. Tomlin's first acting experience was in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot at Wayne State University. After two years of college, she headed for a show business career in New York, where one of her first acts was as a waitress at a Broadway Howard Johnson's. "Attention, diners," she announced over the loudspeaker one evening. "Your Howard Johnson's waitress of the week, Miss Lily Tomlin, is about to make her appearance on the floor. Let's all give her a big hand!" Tomlin's peculiar brand of humor was not one of the 28 flavors that Howard Johnson's featured —though she got double tips that evening—and the next day she went on to another job. Soon she was entertaining patrons of Manhattan coffeehouses and cabarets—without waiting on tables.
Almost fanatical about her privacy, Tomlin, 33, today lives alone in a one-bedroom house off Sunset Boulevard. She is a militant feminist, and has used the proceeds from her first hit record to buy the movie rights to Cynthia Buchanan's comic novel Maiden, about a disastrously liberated California virgin, in which she eventually hopes to star. Indeed, despite her busy schedule of comic skits on TV variety shows—she is still a Laugh-In regular—and the concert circuit, Lily considers herself first and foremost an actress, and she hankers to play the heavy dramatic parts of a Glenda Jackson. Jackson seems to have cornered the market on Elizabeth I, but the mind boggles at what Tomlin might do with, say, the hidden humor of Victoria Regina.