Watch Barbara Bush Hold Her Own Against David Letterman

“You have ruined my day,” Barbara Bush told David Letterman in 1994, shortly after joining him onstage at the Late Show, during a press tour for her memoir. “I’ve been interviewed all day long, and everybody says, ‘You are going to be on David Letterman . . . All day long! I have an inferiority complex. Roseanne Barr, Stupid Pet Tricks, Madonna, . . . and Barbara Bush?”

The former First Lady’s worries were for naught. Within the span of a 12-minute segment, Barbara Bush—who died April 17 at the age of 91—took the stage in pearls and a pantsuit, charming and schooling her sardonic host. She found an elegant way to suggest Letterman quit smoking cigars; put a firm stop to his nosy political questions (“I probably won’t answer, but go on”); threatened a Secret Service arrest with a smile; and delighted audiences with tales of her husband’s post-presidential love affair with Sam’s Club.

Bush’s well-honed sense of humor was not a surprise so much as it was a treat, when shared with the public. This was the same woman, after all, who once joked of her son becoming president: “I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.”