I think I was eleven when I learned what camp was. Not the one where you go out in the woods, the other kind. The fun kind.
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse arrived on TV in a riot of color and music, a standout in a children’s media landscape dominated by cash-ins, twenty-minute toy commercials, and incredibly cheap animation. Paul Reubens, the show’s creator, was justly given most of the credit for the show’s runaway success (and faced most of the backlash when he was arrested in an adult movie theater), but its extraordinary cast also made a difference: deadpan John Paragon, in a sparkling turban, as Jambi the Genie; Laurence Fishburne’s charming Cowboy Curtis; Phil Hartman as awkward seaman Captain Carl; and, of course, Lynne Marie Stewart as Miss Yvonne, the Most Beautiful Woman in Puppet Land. Miss Yvonne’s big bouffant hairdo, sparkling jewelry and voluminous skirts helped define what ‘pretty’ was for preteen me, and her warm and sweet smile made me want to be her very best friend. (She cited Sandra Dee and Marilyn Monroe as major influences on the character.)
Stewart seemed to have that same magnetism offscreen. She was born in LA, spending a lot of her childhood and teenage years in Beverly Hills. She wore a “beautiful dress” as Christmas Joy in an elementary school play and realized she wanted acting to be her career. She was in The Groundlings (along with Reubens, Hartman, Paragon and Edie McClurg, all of whom helped develop The Pee-Wee Herman Show for the stage. She also befriended Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson there). A friend of Richard Dreyfus since childhood (she called him “Ricky”), she appeared in American Graffiti in a small role, and showed up on a few episodes of M*A*S*H, always as a nurse. Her character dated (and cheated on) David Lander’s Squiggy in Laverne and Shirley and appeared in its spinoff cartoon. When some cocaine-addled executive decided that The Pee-Wee Herman Show would make great kids’ entertainment1, Stewart came along for the ride, sporting the highest hairdos and the fanciest dresses imaginable. At conventions, she figured out a way to give free photos to little girls whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t buy one (“Guess what,” she’d say. “You’re my fiftieth customer, so you get a free photo!”)
She mostly stayed in comedy, playing a nun twice (The Golden Girls and Mike Tyson Mysteries), nurses, moms and grandmas, and also spent time onstage. She liked her men big and cuddly in The Running Man. She joined her friends for many of her projects, including Cindy Williams’ all-female Odd Couple on stage, and Peterson’s Elvira movie. She appeared in Pee-Wee’s feature films, wrote two episodes for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and helped care for Paul Reubens at the end of his life.
She’ll probably be best known for Miss Yvonne, who she reprised in the 2010s, or the role that gained her fame in what would, unfortunately, be her final years: Charlie Kelly’s mom Bonnie on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a pleasantly daffy semi-retired sex worker indirectly responsible for one of the most iconic moments in Sunny history.
(Santa probably did fuck Charlie’s mom.)
Due to that role, she spent a lot of time with Sandy Martin, the actress and playwright who plays Mac’s mom; their scenes are comedy gold. Better yet, they seem to have gotten along really well off-screen.
We have one final film of hers to look forward to: The Dink, a comedy about pickleball with Jake Johnson, Ed Harris, and Mary Steenburgen, among others. I don’t know if it’ll be any good, but I’ll bet that Lynne Marie Stewart will be funny as hell in it.
(The 1981 Pee-Wee stage show is available on Max at the time of this obituary. It’s a lot of fun, and there’s even an oddly timely Sly Stone cover. It also features a bit from a short Rifftrax viewers might recognize. Stewart brings the audience to absolute hysterics. I also recommend this long podcast interview with Stewart.)
Special thanks to Patrick L. for finding some of the interviews I used for this piece.
- They were entirely correct. ↩︎
This is a lovely eulogy for someone I didn’t realize I’d come across so many times. And what a kind thing for her to do re: the photos.
Thank you!
She really seemed to have been a gem.
So perfectly strange and funny as Charlie’s mom, I had no idea she was Miss Yvonne until recently. Legend.
I didn’t make the connection for a long time either, but of course one of the grungy maniacs in Always Sunny is a huge contrast from The Most Beautiful Woman in Puppet Land.