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Whether you are at a party or a dinner, on your first day at a new job, meeting your new neighbors, or in any one of a million different settings, the subjects that you can open a conversation with are almost unlimited.
During the 1994 winter Olympics, unless the person you were talking to had just landed from Mars, you could talk about the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan episode. Mark Twain once complained that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, yet the reality is that weather is always a can’t miss and completely safe subject for starting a conversation, especially if you know absolutely zero about the other person. Floods in the Midwest, earthquakes, forest fires, and mud slides on the West Coast, and snow and ice in the East provide us with ample openers.
Even though W. C. Fields said, "Any man who hates kids and animals can’t be all bad," most people love both, and many have both. Even Fields himself would have agreed that once you learn the person across from you has either kids or pets, you can be off and running, talking to them with the greatest of ease.
Vice President Al Gore is criticized by some for being too stiff, a "wooden" personality on TV, although I have never found him that way. But even those who do would see he is a lively, enthusiastic, and animated person if he’s asked about the Baltimore Orioles or his school days at Saint Albans in Washington when his father was a senator from Tennessee. Get him talking about his children, and you’ll also see a very warm and human Al Gore.
Any of these subjects would get a conversation with the vice president off to a successful start. Obviously there are many political subjects he could talk about at length. But it’s the things that are closest to him personally that make him open up the most. This is true for other people, too.
If you’re at a party, the occasion itself is often a starting point for talk. When my friends threw a party for my sixtieth birthday, they called it "the fiftieth anniversary of Larry King’s tenth birthday" and gave it a 1940s Brooklyn theme. Lots of conversations that night began with the Dodgers, Coney Island, and other nostalgic topics. Sometimes the setting can give you a conversational wedge. That night the party was held in the historic Decatur House across from the White House, another subject I heard people talking about there.
If you’re at a party in someone’s home, or even an office, there are likely to be furnishings or mementos that your hosts will cheerfully talk about. Is there a picture of them in Red Square? Ask them about their trip to Russia. Is there a crayon drawing on the wall? Ask which of their children or grandchildren drew it.