Condoleeza Rice was on The Tonight Show last night, and she is really an amazing person. While I don’t agree with her on everything, you can’t dispute that she is very talented, and has a very interesting story.

For some lame reason NBC doesn’t have the whole interview available, but I’ll include what they do have below. It’s most of the second segment. The first segment is not online.

I missed the first few minutes, but what I did catch:

• She wanted to be a concert pianist when she was younger. She could read music before she could read words.
• After she decided a career in music probably wasn’t too practical, she got in to politics. Her first real political class was taught by Madeline Albright’s father.
• She was the Provost at Stanford University. She first met Hilary Clinton when Clinton was bringing Chelsea to college at Stanford.
• Her father tried to register to vote as a Democrat in Alabama but had some issues with the Poll test. (It was “how many beans are in this jar.”) So they found the Republican clerk and he registered as a Republican. He was a Republican his entire life.
• Rice herself was first a Democrat, but switched to the Republican party in opposition to The Feckless Jimmy Carter’s Feckless position toward the Soviet Union.
• Bonus from wiki: her name is derived from the Italian musical expression, Con dolcezza, which means “with sweetness.”

Here’s the video:

Source: The Tonight Show