Lily Tomlin recalls her past … as a waitress

• Greg Gorman
• Lily Tomlin performs at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts at 7 p.m. Sunday, November 20.

Early in her career, Lily Tomlin used to perform a comedy monologue about supporting herself as a performer in order to work at the career she really wanted: to be the head waitress at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. The routine was both a a satirical riff on the number of wanna-be actors and actresses working as servers in New York restaurants and the plotline of the movie 42nd Street, where the stage star breaks her foot, and the understudy goes on in her place. In Tomlin’s tale, she was the ambitious waitress waiting for her big break, which only comes when the head waitress breaks her leg on a busy Saturday night.

Like much of Tomlin’s material, this story was autobiographical. After dropping out of Wayne State University in the mid-1960s, Tomlin moved to New York and got a job as a waitress at the legendary Howard Johnson’s Times Square restaurant at 49th and Broadway. (The venue was finally razed, after 46 years of serving clam rolls and ice-cream sundaes, in 2005.)

Even as a waitress, the former Mary Jean Tomlin from Detroit, Michigan, was performing. The Howard Johnson’s dining room was just one more stage.