So then she said

My favorite thing to say at a social gathering when the conversation suddenly dives into an uncomfortable silence is, "Yeah, and so then she said, 'That's not my arm.'" The beauty of this phrase is that it's so random that most people are completely caught off-guard by it. Depending on how you inflect it, the sentance can have a totally different meaning every time. Another good opertunity to use this is when you are talking to a devious friend while walking somewhere, and just as you pass a group of total strangers, you let that phrase slip out of your mouth so that they can hear you just fine. You can get some really fun reactions from people. Or you can use it as a psychological test to see how perverted the people that you're talking to are.

I've always been a fan of that line, if someone turns, I explain that it was a story about the time I had bought a shiwalla wash, or a George Foreman grill, or the mister T water hose toy.

Honestly though, when people aren't paying attention, I like to talk about my 'trips to Mexico.' When people walk by, I just 'happen to remark' that "Yup, that's how I got this scar on my chin (or the back of my head, hidden in my hair, or my raging mop, as it were), I suggest you never end up in a knife fight in Guadalupe." I actually ended up with a whole series of made up stories about my venture to Guadalupe in New Mexico, where I got in a knife fight with my former best friend, on the bitterest Halloween of my life, which is actually a conglomeration of different real stories from my life, with New Mexico (or Mexico, if I'm fighting strangers, and not my friends) and the knives being added to 'embellish' it properly.

A good catch phrase though, honestly, is this.

"And so then I woke up in a bathtub full of ice, with a note written in lipstick on the mirror. Yeah, it was the number of the hospital."

Granted, it's a little lengthy, but you can always feign missing a kidney (trust me, not too difficult) and amaze all of your upscale friends who've led pedestrian lives. Also, 'bathtub full of ice' is the only part of the sentence people need to hear to glue them to you for the rest of it.