100 WOMEN WE LOVE 2008
Lily Tomlin’s extraordinary career as a funny lady bloomed on the TV show Laugh-In in 1969, the year of the Stonewall rebellion. Fittingly, she has woven feminism and LGBT life into her characters—the not-so-hardworking phone operator Ernestine, Violet Newstead in 9 to 5 and the numerous personas populating The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman play written by Tomlin’s partner Jane Wagner, for which Tomlin won a Tony Award. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as Linnea Reese in Robert Altman’s Nashville, played recurring roles on TV shows from Murphy Brown to The West Wing, and has won six Emmys, a Grammy, and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1977. Tomlin, who has called Wagner the most influential person in her life and career, narrated 1995’s landmark LGBT documentary The Celluloid Closet. –KL
In no particular order…
Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Yolanda Hippensteele
As outreach director at the national, nonpartisan media reform group Free Press, Yolanda Hippensteele has been working 16-hour days “to figure out how to wrest control of the media from the hands of a few big corporations and create a media system that supports justice and equality.” In addition to creating Free Press’ Media Reform Toolkit, Hippensteele directed the National Conference for Media Reform and has organized everything from local town meetings to FCC hearings. “The National Conference for Media Reform is a gathering for people who see something wrong with the state of our media system and want to work for change,” she says. “Over 3,000 activists, journalists, scholars, media producers, tech geeks, bloggers, policymakers, artists and concerned citizens are coming together to share all the big ideas and make all the connections that will help us chart a course for creating a media system that speaks to the needs of the public, not profit.” –MF
In no particular order…
