Michelle Obama’s goodbye fete Wednesday on “The Tonight Show” was way more upbeat than President Obama’s emotional farewell address to the nation. She was Jimmy Fallon’s sole guest and the late night host dedicated his entire show to her. 
 
 When she walked out onto the “Tonight Show” set, Fallon — who began hosting the show soon after the Obamas took office — said he felt emotional while watching the president’s final speech. “I lost it at home,” he said. “Malia was crying. Sasha she wasn’t there.” 
 
 Michelle Obama explained that her youngest daughter stayed home. “You know the Obamas, �?Girl sorry. You better take your test. ... You can say goodbye later,’” she said, laughing. 
 
 The first lady said the end of her husband’s administration has “been surprisingly emotional for all of us in ways that we didn’t expect.” She cried at her final event in the White House last week and Fallon asked her why. 
 
 “Talking about kids. Kids are my heart,” she said. “When I think about the fact that some of them are afraid of the future, of what is to come. I don’t want them to be afraid. I want them to embrace the future and know that the world is getting better. We have bumps in the road. We have ups and downs but I want our kids to move forward — I don’t care where they come from — with strength and with hope.” 
 
 First Lady Michelle Obama participates in a potato sack race with Jimmy Fallon in the East Room of the White House in 2012. (Chuck Kennedy/The White House) 
 
 She also pledged to continue working on her initiatives to encourage young people to pursue higher education and eat healthy. “I’m not done. I’m too young. I’m too young to stop,” she said. “We’ve made plans for the continuation of all that we’re doing. I will continue to stay involved with these issues as long as I live. The fact that we have made huge strides especially in the school lunch program, which I hope does not get touched because it makes sense.” 
 
 The closest Fallon got to asking the first lady about politics was a question about her meeting with her successor. Michelle Obama said she had given Melania Trump advice on how to create a safe space for her family while living in the White House. She added that she’d be there in the future to help Melania or Ivanka — if they want her assistance. 
 
 Fallon also showed a pre-taped video of passerbys that he invited to record thank you messages for the first lady. After each one, the first lady popped from behind the curtain and surprised the overwhelmed fans with big hugs. 
 
 Fallon has created some viral video moments with both Obamas through the years. The president slow jammed the news with Fallon twice. Michelle Obama has performed skits with him, including “The Evolution of Mom Dancing” where the two had a dance off. Fallon dressed in drag. Michelle Obama did the dougie. 
 
 The first lady and Fallon did not reprise their skits Wednesday, though she was animated during a game of “Catchphrase” in which she and Fallon teamed up against Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld, who wore a tux for the occasion. Obama, who is competitive and grew up playing games, did the robot dance to convey a clue and the happy dance when she and Fallon won. 
 
 In another segment, she and Fallon wrote thank you notes. The comedian penned one to Michelle Obama. “Thank you, Mrs. Obama, for being a strong, smart, independent woman — an activist, a style icon and a great dancer, and showing us all what it would look like if Beyoncé married a much nerdier Jay Z,” he said. 
 
 She wrote one to her husband: “Thank you, Barack, for proving you’re not a lame duck but my very own silver fox.” 
 
 First lady Michelle Obama. (Molly Riley/AP) 
 
 The show closed with a performance by Stevie Wonder, who is the first lady’s favorite singer. He remixed one of his most famous songs for her. “My Michelle amour, lovely as a summer day. My Michelle amour, you’re the only one that we adore. … You’ll always be first lady in our lives.” ||||| This time, Michelle Obama got to say her goodbyes. 
 
 With barely a week left in office, the First Lady joined Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” Wednesday night to talk about leaving the White House. 
 
 “I didn’t think it was going to be that emotional,” she told the TV host. “It’s been surprisingly emotional for all of us in ways that we didn’t expect.” 
 
 Speaking about what comes next, the First Lady said she was worried about children's futures. 
 
 Michelle Obama will be remembered by her class, style and smarts 
 
 Michelle Obama joined Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” Wednesday in her final late show appearance as sitting First Lady. (NBC/Andrew Lipovsky/NBC) 
 
 “When I think about the fact that some of them are afraid about what’s to come. I don’t want them to be afraid. I want them to embrace the future and know that the world is getting better," she said. "We have bumps in the road, we have ups and downs. But I want our kids to move forward, I don’t care where they come from, with strength and with hope.” 
 
 Obama offered her support to the incoming Trump family, including Melania and Ivanka, with the transition. 
 
 “This democracy is not about party. We’re all trying to get things done,” she told Fallon. “We’re going to be supportive to the Trump administration for as much as we can be.” 
 
 Michelle Obama: First Lady with Style 
 
 As for the initiatives she’d put in place over the last four years, the First Lady said she intends to stay involved “as long as I live.” 
 
 First Lady Michelle Obama calls the job her ‘greatest honor’ 
 
 She specifically picked out her school lunch program as an approach that she wants to outlive the Obama presidency. 
 
 “I hope it does not get touched because that makes sense,” she said pointedly. 
 
 Fallon also had “regular people” bid farewell to a portrait of the First Lady before revealing that she was standing behind a curtain listening. 
 
 Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld joined the show for a game of Catchphrase and Stevie Wonder came in for a performance of “Isn’t She Lovely” and "My Cherie Amour" dedicated to Obama. 
 
 Obama tearfully thanks Michelle Obama for her 'grace and grit' 
 
 Obama’s final late show appearance as sitting first lady came just a day after her husband’s final speech, a message of hope in Chicago. 
 
 Obama also played Catchphrase with Fallon, Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chapelle. (NBC/Andrew Lipovsky/NBC) 
 
 In the farewell address, the President thanked his wife for taking on “a role you didn’t ask for and made it your own with grace and with grit and with style and with good humor.” 
 
 “You made the White House a place that belongs to everybody,” he said. “And a new generation sets its sights higher because it has you as a role model. You have made me proud and you have made the country prouder.” 
 
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 Music guest Stevie Wonder performs a special medley of "Isn't She Lovely" and "My Cherie Amour" for First Lady Michelle Obama and the Tonight Show audience. 
 
 
 
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 Stevie Wonder Sings "Isn't She Lovely"/"My Cherie Amour" to Michelle Obama 
 
 http://www.youtube.com/fallontonight ||||| "I did not do it to 'normalize' him or to say I believe in his political beliefs or any of that stuff," says Jimmy Fallon at the point, during our recording of an episode of The Hollywood Reporter's 'Awards Chatter' podcast, when our conversation inevitably arrives at the Sept. 15, 2016, episode of The Tonight Show. That evening, with late night's most iconic program sitting atop the 11:30 p.m. ratings, Fallon welcomed as his guest Donald Trump, whom Fallon had previously interviewed seven times on his first NBC late-night show, Late Night, during the Apprentice era, and then taped a sketch with a year before on The Tonight Show, when Trump was a long-shot candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, though, Trump was the nominee — albeit one given no real chance of defeating Hillary Clinton — and Fallon, as jovial an on-screen presence as anyone who has ever held a late-night job, tossed him some softball questions and then asked for — and was granted — permission to "mess up" Trump's hair, which long had been the subject of speculation and derision. 
 
 It was, it turned out, the biggest mistake of Fallon's career. He almost immediately began taking incoming fire on social media from people who felt that Trump was an existential threat to America whom Fallon had 'normalized' for people who were still on the fence about him. "It just got bigger and out of control," Fallon recalls, speaking in his office at 30 Rock. Then came the shots from Fallon's colleagues. "I saw other comedians from other shows making fun of me on Twitter and I go, 'Okay, now I'm just gonna get off,'" he says. "They know the show. I'm just doing five hours a week. I get in at 10 in the morning, I work 'til seven at night and I'm just trying to make a funny show. [Addressing them:] 'You know the grind and you know me. Of all the people in the world, I'm one of the good people — I mean, really. You don't even know what you're talking about if you say that I'm evil or whatever.' But people just jump on the train, and some people don't even want to hear anything else. They're like, 'No, you did that!' You go, 'Well, just calm down and just look at the whole thing and actually see my body of work.'" 
 
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 Fallon was born in Brooklyn and raised in upstate New York. The younger of two children of an IBM employee and a homemaker, he was, as one might assume, a cutup at home and a class clown at school, and developed a fascination with the mechanics of comedy from an early age. He begged his parents to let him stay up late enough to hear the monologue on Johnny Carson's version of The Tonight Show, and he convinced them to provide him with videotapes of Saturday Night Live episodes (which they censored to make them kid-friendly). For a time, it looked like Fallon, an altar boy who attended Catholic schools, might be headed towards the priesthood — "I was really into it, I loved it," he says of life in the church — but in 1992, shortly after graduating high school, he entered, at the encouragement of his mother, a talent contest seeking the funniest person in the Hudson Valley. He performed a bunch of his celebrity impersonations and prevailed, taking home $700, which convinced him to continue to hone his material even as he headed off to Albany's College of Saint Rose. A semester before he was to graduate, Fallon's friend got a tape of his work into the hands of a Brillstein-Grey Entertainment manager, who offered to represent him and urged him to relocate to Los Angeles. His parents blessed the move — after first making him take and pass the test to become a mailman so he would have a fallback career if his dreams out west didn't pan out. 
 
 It wasn't immediately clear that they would. For a while, Fallon was sleeping on friends' couches, subsisting on ramen noodles and barely making ends meet through occasional sets at The Improv, while also taking classes at The Groundlings. He eventually was hired to act in an indie movie and a TV pilot, but insisted on a contractual clause that would set him free were he ever to get an opportunity to realize his greatest dream, namely, working at SNL. Sure enough, his manager was able to secure him an audition in front of Lorne Michaels when Michaels was out in L.A., but Fallon tanked — "It couldn't have been worse," he emphasizes — and Tracy Morgan got the job instead. A year later, though, ahead of the show's 24th season, Fallon was offered another shot, this time at the show's fabled Studio 8H at 30 Rock, and he arrived better prepared — and even managed to crack up the famously stone-faced Michaels. He was invited to join the show's cast and, for six seasons — the latter three of which he spent co-anchoring "Weekend Update" with Tina Fey — was one of its most prolific and popular members. When he eventually left the show to try to pursue a film career, Michaels planted an idea in his head: that Fallon might one day return to 30 Rock six years hence, when Late Night host Conan O'Brien was slated to replace Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show, to become the new host of Late Night. 
 
 Six years later, Fallon — whose movie star aspirations had been dashed by the critical and commercial failures of 2004's Taxi and 2005's Fever Pitch — was again approached by Michaels about that possibility. After consulting with his wife Nancy Juvonen, a producer whom he met on Fever Pitch and married in 2007, he decided he could not turn down the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of not only O'Brien, but also David Letterman before him. NBC executives initially pushed back against Michaels' idea, but they wanted Michaels to serve as the show's executive producer, and Michaels refused to do so unless Fallon was made the host. "That's a big person going to bat for you," Fallon marvels. "I really never forgot that." During the four years that Fallon anchored Late Night, spanning 2009-2013, he crafted the same sort of show that he continues to put on to this day: a light one centered around goofy and endearing jokes, sketches, mimicry and games. He also helped to usher in the era of the viral video with segments like "The History of Rap," with Justin Timberlake, starting in 2010; "Slow Jam the News," which President Barack Obama joined him for in 2012; and "The Evolution of Mom Dancing," for which he partnered with Michelle Obama in 2013. 
 
 When Fallon replaced O'Brien at Late Night, O'Brien replaced Leno at The Tonight Show — but, following a scheduling dispute, O'Brien vacated that job and Leno returned to it. By 2014, though, Leno was ready to leave once and for all, and Fallon was asked to succeed him and become the sixth permanent host of The Tonight Show, after Steve Allen (1954–57), Jack Paar (1957–62), Carson (1962–92), Leno (1992–2009, 2010–14) and O'Brien (2009–10). He accepted, on the conditions that he could remain in New York, where the program had emanated from until 1972, and that he could retain his Late Night sidekick, Steve Higgins, and house band, The Roots. NBC agreed, spending some $5 million to renovate 30 Rock's Studio 6B — the same one in which Fallon had shot Late Night, and Carson used to host The Tonight Show — into The Tonight Show's new home, which now could seat 240. Retitled The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Fallon's program debuted on Feb. 17, 2014, and was a hit off the bat, thanks largely to its youthful host, a true variety performer who could and would sing and dance and clown around with anyone. Thanks to segments like "Lip Sync Battle" (which soon spawned its own spinoff show), "Thank You Notes" and "Battle of the Instant Songwriters," the show shot to the top of the late-night ratings and became a perennial Emmy nominee for best variety series, landing nominations in the summers of 2014, 2015 and 2016. 
 
 Then came the Trump interview, the scathing criticism and the piling on. A month after Trump's visit, the New York Post ran a story suggesting that Fallon's "boozing" had gotten "out of control" and was responsible for several freak injuries that he had suffered in 2015. Then, two months after Trump's visit, Trump beat Hillary Clinton (whose hair Fallon had ruffled on his show the night after Trump stopped by), by winning the presidency, which only further fueled anger towards Fallon. And, ever since Trump assumed office in January 2017, as the entire country has become more politicized, Fallon's show has lost more than one-fifth of its audience and been passed in the ratings by Stephen Colbert's new and more political The Late Show for CBS, while a more politically outspoken Jimmy Kimmel has also propelled ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! to major gains in viewers. "The ratings never bothered me," Fallon insists. "I don't really care about the ratings. I never will. That's someone else's job at NBC." Then, a year ago, to add insult to injury, the TV Academy nominated Colbert and Kimmel's programs for best variety series, but not Fallon's. 
 
 "It was definitely a down time," Fallon somberly says of the period after Trump's last appearance on his show. "And it's tough for morale. There's 300 people that work here, and so when people are talking that bad about you and ganging up on you, in a really gang-mentality..." Choking up, he continues, "You go, 'Alright, we get it. I heard you. You made me feel bad. So now what? Are you happy? I'm depressed. Do you want to push me more? What do you want me to do? You want me to kill myself? What would make you happy? Get over it.'" Fallon adds, "I'm sorry. I don't want to make anyone angry — I never do and I never will. It's all in the fun of the show. I made a mistake. I'm sorry if I made anyone mad. And, looking back, I would do it differently." 
 
 Looking back is not a luxury that Fallon often affords himself — he very rarely grants interviews — because of how busy he is with his wife and two young daughters, and how much time it takes to make quality episodes of TV every weekday. "You have another show tomorrow, so I can't really freak out," Fallon says, and so, he acknowledges, he slaps on a smile even when he's feeling down or sick. To his credit, now, as much as ever, he can be counted on to make funny episodes that lead to widespread conversation and coverage (recent examples include one that he co-hosted with Cardi B on April 9 and another that was essentially taken over by Ariana Grande on May 1), and he still makes time to let loose away from the show (making a May 5 cameo on SNL as Jared Kushner and posting to Instagram a goofy music video that he made with Lin-Manuel Miranda on June 1). But now, maybe more than ever before, Fallon also shows his serious side, both on the show (delivering emotional monologues after the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 14, and the passing of his mom, on Nov. 13) and off it: He sponsored buses to — and he and his family attended — the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24, and he gave the commencement address at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's graduation ceremony in Parkland, Florida, on June 3. 
 
 Twenty-one months after Trump's visit to The Tonight Show, the fallout from it clearly still weighs on Fallon. But nearly 21 years after the host first came to NBC — "Al Roker's probably the only guy that has more time than me," he cracks — he has no doubts that he pursued the right path in life. "I love what I do," Fallon says. "I'm lucky to work with the people I work with. And I hope I get to do this for as long as people are watching." ||||| Michelle Obama says she's eyeing another campaign in 2016 and, contrary to speculation, it doesn't involve running for public office. 
 
 This image released by NBC shows host Jimmy Fallon dressed as a mom, left, dancing with first lady Michelle Obama during an appearance of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," Friday, Feb. 22, 2013 in New York.... (Associated Press) 
 
 This image released by Sony Pictures television shows first lady Michelle Obama, center, and host Dr. Mehmet Oz dancing with third graders from the Terence C. Reilly #7 School in Elizabeth, N.J. to demonstrate... (Associated Press) 
 
 This image released by NBC shows host Jimmy Fallon dressed as a mom, left, dancing with first lady Michelle Obama during an appearance of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," Friday, Feb. 22, 2013 in New York.... (Associated Press) 
 
 This Feb. 22, 2013 photo released by ABC shows host Robin Roberts, left, chef Marcus Samuelson,, center, and first lady Michelle Obama during a taped segment on "Good Morning America," in New York. ... (Associated Press) 
 
 During her first appearance on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" on Friday, the host asked her to consider a Michelle-Hillary ticket for president in 2016. The latter is former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Mrs. Obama's husband. Speculation is rampant that Clinton is gearing up to run again in 2016. 
 
 "You know, I have my eye actually on another job. And I hear that when Jay Leno retires that `The Tonight Show' position is going to open and I'm thinking about putting my hat in the ring," the first lady says, according to an excerpt of the appearance released before airtime by NBC. 
 
 "I got my hat in the ring," Fallon replies. 
 
 Mrs. Obama then asks for his opinion, but Fallon's answer suggests he's had a quick change of heart about challenging her. "I'm done thinking about it," he says, laughing. 
 
 The first lady visited the late-night talk show to promote "Let's Move," her anti-childhood obesity campaign, which marked its third anniversary this month. 
 
 She also danced with Fallon, who was dressed like a woman. 
 
 Besides the appearance on "Late Night," Mrs. Obama discussed the initiative while in New York City during segments taped for broadcast Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America" and Thursday on "The Dr. Oz Show." Next Wednesday, Mrs. Obama embarks on a two-day promotional tour, with stops in Clinton, Miss.; Chicago; and Springfield, Mo. 
 
 For the second anniversary of "Let's Move," she and Fallon turned the East Room of the White House into a playground. They did pushups, twirled hula hoops, and competed at dodge ball and tug-of-war before the first lady triumphed over the comedian in a climactic potato sack race. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
– Jimmy Fallon devoted an entire episode of The Tonight Show on Wednesday to bidding farewell to First Lady Michelle Obama, whom he called "a strong, smart, independent woman, an activist, a style icon, and a great dancer." Obama was Fallon's sole guest, though Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld appeared for a game of Catchphrase. Obama even helped Fallon write his usual "thank you" notes, penning "Thank you, Barack, for proving you're not a lame duck but my very own silver fox," per the Washington Post. She was then serenaded by her favorite singer Stevie Wonder, who altered the lyrics of "My Cherie Amour," singing "My Michelle amour, you're the only one that we adore … You'll always be first lady in our lives." There were more serious moments, too. As guests delivered emotional farewell messages to a photo of Obama during one segment, the first lady jumped out from behind a curtain, leaving a few in tears. Obama also told Fallon that the end of her husband's term has "been surprisingly emotional for all of us." She said she felt like crying when thinking "about the fact that some [kids] are afraid of the future, of what is to come. I don't want them to be afraid," but rather "embrace the future … with strength and with hope," per the New York Daily News. Obama added she would return to the White House if invited by the Trump administration, but she plans to stay involved in the initiatives she set up as first lady "as long as I live."