...the day
Not quite a "you'll never believe what some idiot said" story, but I like this anecdote (told by Edward Gorey in a book of interviews with him):
The party was very strange, There were very few people from the ballet there, like five people. I had gotten invited on the strength of having done the invitations and stuff. Anyway, everybody was standing around, and I said in one of my best loud flippant voices, "Who are all these people, do you suppose?" There was this middle-aged lady, whose husband came up and said, "Oh, well, listen, we're old friends of Allegra's." I made it worse; I said, "Well, I didn't mean you."
Comments
on 2005-04-18 14:59:25.0, bitchphd commented:
See, I do stuff like that all the time, of course.
In fact, I once saw a much older woman handle exactly that kind of gaffe by saying exactly that: "Oh dear! It's just like me to say something like that, I do it all the time. I shouldn't be allowed out of the house, I'm so sorry..."
I filed it away as an excellent way to handle just such a situation.