ImLilyTomlin

He smells like oak paneling and hunter green billiard’s bed. I would say he definitely smells presidential - old timey presidential. And some cigar ash mixed in.

That’s how I imagine he smells. I have rarely gotten a good smell of him...

It's kind of hard to talk against what your inclinations are and it'd be hard for me to kill someone. I don't even know if I could ever pull it off unless I was in a life-or-death struggle to defend myself. But I think if I had a boss like some of them I've had who are just totally cuckoo, I'd probably just tie them down and make them listen to - I'd photograph a lot of footage on them - and then I would make them just lie there, or sit there, or stand there, and just absorb all that abuse or whatever that inequity, that failure to understand how their minions working under them might feel about certain behavior. I'd just rattle it and rattle it and rattle it, until they either called uncle, or gave up, or did something like run screaming down the street, bindings and all, no matter what. I would hope that somehow they would run into their demise on their own, not at my hand. But, I'm kind of chicken that way.

And Jane Fonda, our relationship, probably we just both have matured and aged into such an extent that we understand what it is to be a pal or a friend, understanding one another and accepting whatever the other person has to say or do, without judgment. It's turned out pretty nice and pretty cool. We maybe are able to bring that to the relationship between Grace and Frankie, I hope so. I think we do.

Well, I first came to work with Jane – I met her in New York. She was a friend of a very close friend of mine and I was totally taken with her as soon as I laid eyes on her. I was on the road – I had stopped off in New York because I was releasing a record album, it was the ‘Modern Scream’ album that Polydoor released.

I wasn’t flying in those days…so many of my friends had died one way or another – from drug overdoses or whatever had happened, so I had sort of stopped flying and I had taken a train to New York on this particular occasion but I had to be back in Chicago by a certain time and I wound up taking the train to Chicago and when I got there, I just felt that I had unfinished business with Jane – so I jumped on a plane and went right back to New York!

I knew Jane was a writer and all my friends that knew her said ‘she’s so fantastic, she’s so brilliant, she’s so beautiful’ – and she was all that, I didn’t know what her projects were like – she had done a thing about a kid in Harlem saving a stray cat and it was written for children’s programming for after-school, but it was so widely received and so celebrated that they played it in primetime, and they played it every year for 25 years after that…at holiday time, at Christmas.

I saw that and was so taken with it and I was working on my Edith Ann character – she had an album due out…and I wanted Jane to write for Edith because she’d written this play about this young boy and it was just so filled with observations and perceptions and everything…and yet it seemed totally natural and true to the characters speaking. So I wrote her and asked her if she’d work on my Edith Ann record and – weeks went by…weeks went by…pretty soon I got a little notebook filled with her scratchings and notations in the margins and it was so much better than anything that I’d had up to that point that I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce the album.

She showed up about two days before we had to go in the studio – and we really shot the album live so we were shooting live, but we went in the studio and produced the album and she was a sound effects freak…she filled the album with sound effects – you have to listen to it with headphones so you can hear all the sounds. I played the lady in the neighborhood that the kid latches on to and you hear both pairs of feet walking, walking, walking all through the neighborhood – it was a work of love and we were just mad for it. That was the first thing we did together and my character just bloomed and blossomed and became so much more than she had been…and I liked it.

No no no, I saw David last night at the movie awards, Movies for Grownups where he won Best Screenplay and I won Best Actress in a Movie for Grandma, and no we've seen each other many times since then. Plus we finished the movie, for gosh sakes, that takes a lot of friendship and stick-to-it-ive-ness. And David's absolutely one of the great talents that I've ever worked with. All my friends would say, "Well you're not gonna work with him anymore, are you?" And I'd say, "I would in a heartbeat." I mean he's so gifted that you'd want to work with him. So, no we were absolutely friends. Nobody fakes that. I don't think they fake it. Well, if they fake it, they're probably faking everything else, so let it go.

Hey u/courtiebabe420! Well, my favorite project has been working in the theatre. The favorite show I ever did was The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by my partner Jane Wagner. I used to love it because when I'd come out of the theatre at night, there'd be a little gaggle of people - this was back in '85 - people would be outside, there'd be middle-aged housewives from Omaha, their first trip to New York with pocketbooks hanging from their hand, and their shoes matched... and there'd be a hip kind of yuppie couple just dressed to the teeth and looking dynamite - tall, blonde, brilliant looking. And there'd be some goth kids all punked out in makeup, and they'd all be so influenced and affected by the play, and so validated – each and every one of them in their own way, that they would just be hugging and tearful; just overcome with emotion. And then they would grab me and drag me into the group hug, and I felt so validated by that, those audiences. And so uplifted, and that would be my favorite creative project that I was involved in.

Right now I would hope that we're working on another show, maybe a sequel to The Search, or something like that so that I could go back to the theatre and do that again for many many many many many, many many performances and just totally groove on it.