Before each taping of the Late Show, Stephen Colbert answers questions from the studio audience. One audience member recently asked him how he knew his wife, Evelyn “Evie” McGee-Colbert, was the one.
“Aw man, how long do we have?” Colbert jokingly stated. “I will make this quick ‘cause I like this story.”
Colbert then launched into an elaborate answer, recalling how he had been dating a girl for many years, and she had given him an ultimatum: get married or break-up. The comedian then decided to take a week-long trip home to Charleston, South Carolina to figure out what he wanted to do. When he talked about it with his mother when he arrived, she asked him if he loved her and wanted to get married, and he replied that he didn’t know. “‘I don’t know’ isn’t good enough,” his mother told him, prompting Colbert to break up with his girlfriend.
Colbert then attended a musical with his mother while he was visiting.
“So I go, I walk into the lobby with my mom,” he recounted. “I’m wearing a sharkskin suit, looking pretty good. I’m about 40 pounds lighter than I am now. And I’ve got a beard. And I walk in and I see across the lobby this woman, I think, for the first time. Not girl, woman. Beautiful woman in a black linen dress standing below one of the sconces in the lobby, and I think, ‘her!’ Honest to God, I thought, ‘There’s your wife, you’re going to marry her.’”
After eyeing each other all evening, the two met in the food line at an after party and realized that they had grown up together. They ended up talking for two hours.
Colbert, thinking it was possible that she didn’t like him and was just being nice to him, decided to give her a chance to flee from him. “I’m going to give her one minute to get away… so I turned my back for what now is clearly, to me, the most harrowing minute of my life,” he said. “What if she’d gone away? But she didn’t! She was still there when I turned around. Smiling at me. And now we’re married.”
The couple has been married for over twenty years. Watch Colbert tell the story of their meeting in the video below:
