If you can believe it (and you should) Stephen Colbert has something of an operatic past. In his youth, apparently, he was associated with the Spoleto festivals in Charleston, S.C.

Per Alex Ross and his blog "The Rest Is Noise", an opera fellow named "Steven Colbert" (that's with a "v") got a write up back in 1983 in Charleston's "Post and Courier" paper, performing bit roles in Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra as well as a "nude brothel customer" in Madama Butterfly.

The Colbert Report is notorious for featuring legendary artists on his televised stage (the likes of Pete Seeger, Bonnie Raitt, The Mountain Goats and so on). The other night on the Report, Plácido Domingo dropped in for a note or two to grace audiences and TV-watchers with some studded opera.

And if it isn't standard then it should be, Colbert jumped in for a tune, too, and it is none other than the famous "La Donne e Mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto.

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