Scrambling to make small talk at all those festive open houses and cocktail parties? Scan Fifty Years of Our Own Oddities, just published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and you can open any conversation—we’re just not sure how you’ll close it.
Note your surroundings.
Start slow: Stare intently at a single potato chip. Then reminisce about the tuber that looked like Richard M. Nixon. Take pity on the young woman nervously swirling her wine, and ask what her favorite sign is. Then mention yours: perhaps “Old Faceful” (on a drinking fountain in the Lake of the Ozarks) or “Let me rust in peace” (on an old truck in Normandy).
Name drop.
Weary of hearing about lunch with a Danforth or martinis with the von Gontards? One-up the namedropping by making yours rhyme. You could start with the Voss siblings in Chesterfield: Geri J., Perry J., Terri J., Sherry J., Barry J., Gary J., Larry J., Cary J., and Mary J., who married a man named Gary. Or go for shock value: In 1987, there were three—three—Dorothy Irenes in the same Northwest YMCA morning swimnastic class.
Ask about hobbies.
Take Rudolf Sida: He made himself an army of more than 1,000 dressed and painted grasshoppers. Prefer golf? Consider Joe Matika’s trick. The Belleville golfer teed off on the eighth hole and sank a hole-in-one—on the seventh. Somebody mock-groaning about all the iPhone apps they’ve downloaded? Well, Arthur Santen had 2,000 different bottle and can openers.
Up the ante.
If the host bores you with a knee-slapper about how the dog stole Uncle Fred’s turkey leg right off the table, top it with the dog who howled every time a hen laid an egg—or the pig that walked on its front legs, the toad that smoked, the blue jay that barked and meowed…Scare the couple smooching under the mistletoe by telling them that “Mr. & Mrs. C. Robt. Wawrzuniak of St. Peters saved 50 small pieces of their wedding cake since April 20, 1968—they eat a piece of this cake every year.”
Curb complaining.
A woman’s mortified she was wearing the same dress the last time you saw her? Pshaw. Brian Sindel’s baptismal gown had already made it through 54 baptisms. People bitching about their jobs? Elmer Utter sold newspapers for 50 years. A laptop keeps crashing? When Jim Steele sneezed, the channel on his TV changed!
