Madonna on Oprah

Madonna forgets to use her nice voice.

Madonna beamed herself over to The Oprah Winfrey Show via satellite Tuesday for an interview on her controversial adoption of Malawi orphan David Banda. The episode doesn’t air until Wednesday afternoon, but Oprah.com left some interview excerpts under our chair, which we will share with you below.

On whether the adoption was “rushed” because she’s a celebrity:
"I assure you it doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have, nothing goes fast in Africa. There are no adoption laws in Malawi. And I was warned by my social worker that because there were no known laws in Malawi, they were more or less going to have to make them up as we went along. And she did say to me, ’Pick Ethiopia. Go to Kenya. Don’t go to Malawi because you’re just going to get a hard time.’"

On the first time she saw David:
"I’m financing a documentary about orphans in Malawi, so I was allowed to view footage and photographs of a lot of the children. An 8-year-old girl who is living with HIV was holding this child. I became transfixed by him. … But I didn’t yet know I was going to adopt him. I was just drawn to him."

On David’s tragic past:
"David had been living in this orphanage since he was two weeks old. He had survived malaria and tuberculosis, and no one from his extended family had visited him since the time he arrived. So from my perspective, there was no one looking after David’s welfare."

On Lourdes and Rocco’s reaction to their new brother:
"They just embraced him, and that’s the amazing thing about children. They don’t ask questions. They’ve never once said, ’What is he doing here’, or mentioned the difference in his skin color, or questioned his presence in our life. That is an amazing lesson that children do teach us."

On the media controversy surrounding the adoption:
"I’m disappointed because it discourages other people from doing the same thing — for anybody who had the idea that they, too, would like to open their home and give a life to a child living in an orphanage who might possibly not live past the age of 5. Anybody who had that idea would be discouraged from doing it. For me, that’s what disappoints me the most. I feel like the media is doing a great disservice to all the orphans of Africa, period, not just Malawi, by turning it into such a negative thing.”

On whether David’s father didn’t understand what he was doing when he agreed to the adoption:
"I do not believe that is true. I sat in that room, I looked into that man’s eyes. I believe that the press is manipulating this information out of him. I believe at this point in time, he’s been terrorized by the media. They have asked him things, repeatedly, and they have put words in his mouth. They have spun a story that is completely false."

We don’t have any footage from the Oprah taping yet, but we do have two interview clips that we like to call "What a Difference Twenty Years and a God Complex Makes." The first clip is Madonna’s first talk show interview ever in 1987 on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she was promoting her panther-communing turn in the film Who’s That Girl? She’s adorably giggly, gracious, and still sounding all Michigan-y. (Note: You have to watch it on YouTube so double-click on it.)

Then there’s the second interview from a few years back in which she orders people around in full faux Bwiddish accent mode. It’s high comedy, particularly when the reporter offers to lend Madge her interview questions to use as a fan if she’ll stop complaining about the stuffiness of the studio.