...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

[bitchphd]

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.