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!).
Lenelle Moïse
Hatian-born poet, playwright and performance artist Lenelle Moïse is influenced by all that is “fierce, open and willing to change.” Moïse’s spoken word CD, Madivinez, won 2007’s Patchwork Radio Award for Best Solo Album, and Sexual Dependency, a feature film she co-wrote, won an International Film Critics’ Award at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland. Her new musical, Expatriate, which opens this July at New York’s Culture Project, examines the sexual tension between long-time friends Claudie and Alphine. Moïse and actor Karla Mosley co-star. “I hope a lot of queer people will see this show,” she says. “It’s all about being brave in voice and in identity.”–LM
In no particular order…
