Happy Birthday Lily Tomlin! And Edith Ann.... who will always be 5 1/2.

When I was a little girl, I LOVED Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann character in the 70's on Sesame Street. I used to immitate her voice a lot. Kids love adults that seem to relate to them, and Lily Tomlin certainly understood kids. Thank you to sawing14s for posting one of my favorite skits from childhood on YouTube. I'd love to see that giant rocking chair to see how big it really was.

I also loved the movie "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" and probably watched it 50 times. I found a clip on YouTube which was one of the best scenes, in which Lily Tomlin's character (which got smaller and smaller throughout the movie) nearly gets killed in a garbage disposal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44zGaru8EJM

I just found out on Lily Tomlin's wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin that she was raised in the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects of Detroit, Michigan. I recognized that name immediately because I knew that Diana Ross was raised there. I thought to myself, "There must have been something special about these housing projects because two people I'm a fan of were raised there." So, I had to look up them up, and found that Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and Smokey Robinson were also raised there. It says that there were between 8,000 to 10,000 residents at it's peak. That many big stars out of a population that size is pretty special. I've lived in cities with populations much bigger than that which haven't had stars that big who were raised there. I can't help but wonder if there was something about growing up there which inspired creativity and motivated talented young people to pursue their talents. 

Back to Lily Tomlin. She celebrates her 70th birthday today. Happy Birthday! She has starred in many great movies over the years, and she's still just as busy as ever, working on a spin-off of Desperate Housewives. Here she was when she was working 9 to 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX5iXfrcElM