Lily Tomlin, the comedian who made “One Ringy Dingy” part of pop vocabulary in the seventies as Ernestine, the telephone operator on Laugh In, says she won a Wild Turkey drinking contest in Aspen, and was seen searching the J-Bar recently for the promised plaque.
Seems late night in 1985, a reporter (now dead) from the Rocky Mountain News (also now dead) challenged Lily Tomlin to a Wild Turkey drinking contest. Tomlin recalls they both knocked back about 13 shots of Wild Turkey bourbon.

Tomlin protests now that a commemorative plaque, which had been promised, was never installed in the bar. Which might be for the best; as it turns out, an asterisk would probably have to be affixed to the record. “I cheated. Totally,” Tomlin confesses now. “I vomited. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I would have died of alcohol poisoning.”

Tomlin went on after Laugh In star in some blockbuster movies (“Nine to Five”), edgy artistic successes (“Flirting with Disaster”), Woody Allen’s oddest film ever (“Shadows and Fog”), and had a few star turns, in “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,” and “Big Business,” which teamed her with Bette Midler. She appeared recently in “The Pink Panther 2,” which reteamed her with Steve Martin, her foil in one of her finest films, “All of Me.”

But she had only returned once to Aspen since 1985 and this latest trip, she set out to search for the Wild Turkey plaque.
Recovering from the Wild Turkey drinking contest was left to her friends. They put the comedian back in shape by dunking her in the hot tub and then rolling her in the snow. Later when she had do a radio interivew, Tomlin says she was totally recovered from the Wild Turkey challenge.

“I was like a million bucks,” Tomlin said from her home in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood. “In fabulous shape. Radiant.”

Tomlin’s memory of the rest of her Aspen stay is not quite as vivid. She can’t recall the names of restaurants she frequented. For the length of her stay, she takes a stab at three weeks. (Records show it was six, from late February into March.) In fact, she can’t even remember how it came to be that she workshopped the one-woman show “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in Aspen, and in the process swapped homes with John Denver.

Tomlin will return to Aspen with her show, An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin. “I hope I have a day on either side there,” she said, hoping to revisit old times and places.

Tomlin says she likes to keep her “Classic Lily Tomlin” events wide open. “A lot of first-person, free-form. Informal,” she said. “And if the venue wants me to, I’ll do a Q&A at the end.”

The show leans heavily on the various characters created by the Detroit native: Ernestine, the gum-cracking, wisecracking telephone operator; the little girl Edith Ann; the slick Tommy Velour. She can also break out characters from “The Search for Signs.”

Tomlin says she pretty much expected to do character sketches her entire career. She never imagined herself jumping from television to feature films; that was a tough thing to do in the early ’70s — even if her “Laugh-In” co-star, Goldie Hawn, had done so.