My chat with Lily Tomlin…

I just love Lily Tomlin.

If you love her too, then check her out tonight at The Comedy Store when she hosts the Voice for the Animals 6th Annual Stand Up for the Animals benefit.

Miss Tomlin  got involved with the cause when she was working to have Billy the Elephant transferred from the LA Zoo to a sanctuary – efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful before the LA City Council.

“I don’t think it was a process in the chambers that was absolutely filled with honor an integrity, let me put it that way,” she said this week. “I almost got excused from the proceedings. They don’t let you do anything. You can’t be a human being if you feel there’s a real injustice going on. If you speak up, you better be very careful and do it in a very correct way and so on.”

I wondered if she went all I Heart Huckabees on the lawmakers. Miss Tomlin laughed and replied: “Oh no, no. No I Heart Huckabees. No, no please, no more of that.” I ask if that incident – made quite famous via YouTube – had become a forbidden topic: “No! I did it! I don’t mind. Bring it up! I don’t mind it but it would be a terrible thing to do to the people who were fighting for Billy! They would have been so mad at me.”

In case you’ve never seen it, here is Miss Tomlin’s famous explosion at director David O. Russell (Just imagining her doing this to the LA City Council about Billy the Elephant makes it all the funnier:

Miss Tomlin had read some of my columns on the fabulously delicious 12 Miles of Bad Road, a series she made for HBO that had her playing the matriarch of a dysfunctional and very wealthy Texas family. It featured Emmy-worthy work by Miss Tomlin and a first-rate cast including Mary Kay Place, Leslie Jordan and Gary Cole. So why have you never heard of it? Because HBO pulled the plug before the series ever aired! I continue to write about it because I want it to air on Lifetime or somewhere or at the very least, bew released on DVD. It should be seen! Everyone would love it – especially the gays! Hey, maybe Logo will snap it up?

Miss Tomlin, who is also performing in Costa Mesa at the Orange County Performing Aets Center on Friday night, noticed the columns I wrote and was grateful for my effiorts: “You were so kind in doing that stuff about 12 Miles and everything.”