Claudia Foundation's Exec. Director on Lily Tomlin Event
Stacey Million, Executive Director of the Poplar Bluff-based Claudia Foundation (www.claudiafoundation.org), is seeing to a host of administrative details as Friday evening’s Lily Tomlin fundraiser for the Foundation draws near.
“People are really excited about the show,” she says. “[Ms. Tomlin’s] doing her one-woman, 90-minute show that has sold out across the country.”
Million says that “whether you’ve seen her characters before or not, it’s going to be a funny, some might say hilarious, show”.
Million takes pleasure in the fact that this one-of-a-kind event will be staged in Poplar Bluff’s own Art Moderne-era architectural masterpiece, the Rodgers Theatre, timed to the long-anticipated restoration of its expansive balcony.
Says Million: “The theater itself has so many memories for so many people. They’ll enjoy showing their kids where they had their first date, and that kind of thing”.
So how did the plan for a Lily Tomlin visit come into being, exactly? “Lily and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the founder of our Foundation, are friends,” explains Million. “They’ve worked on some projects together.
“Linda’s been asking a few of her friends to assist with Claudia Foundation projects. Dixie Carter [Designing Women; Desperate Housewives] was here in 2005; and the next year, Leslie Jordan [Boston Legal; Will & Grace] came and did a comedy routine.”
Million says that while the Foundation was making plans for this year’s roster of events, “Linda said, ‘Maybe we could get Lily for the fall’…”.
And the rest, I think it is safe to say, will be history when Tomlin takes the stage at the Rodgers, on what promises to be a stellar evening for the Claudia Foundation, for lovers of live performance, and for the grand old theater itself.
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