Meeting a new person and then flirting with them can be a tense, sweaty experience. Chances are you’re going to say some words they’ve heard before, which is boring; you’re going in with one strike against you. Why not give yourself a fighting chance by arranging those words in new and riveting constructions to reveal odd facts you have recently learned from Wikipedia?

You practice shoehorning unrelated facts into casual conversation. Let Kathie Lee Gifford's fascinating Wikipedia page do the rest.

Entry: Kathie Lee Gifford
Category: Person
Interesting Because: Kathie Lee's life is a thousand times weirder than you ever imagined.
Jumping off points: Morning shows, Paris, sweatshops, snake charmers, carnival barkers, Jews, Native Americans, born-again Christians, Anita Bryant, the Kennedys, Michael Bray, cruises, SlimFast, crackbabies, terrorists, junior high school musicals, etc.

The least interesting thing about Kathie Lee Gifford is that she is a snippy day drunk who encourages women in white pants to get bombed at 10 a.m. Think about that for a moment. That is the LEAST interesting thing about her.

Here are some more interesting things about her, copied directly from her Wikipedia entry:

  • “Gifford was born Kathryn Lee Epstein in Paris, France...”
  • “During her senior year at high school she dated and went to the prom with Michael Bray (who later became an anti-abortion activist convicted for acts of terrorism).”
  • "Her mother, a relative of writer Rudyard Kipling, [...] was raised in a snake handler family.”
  • “After seeing the Billy Graham-produced film, The Restless Ones at age 12, Gifford became a born-again Christian.”
  • “During one summer in the early 1970s, she was a live-in secretary/babysitter for Anita Bryant at her home in Miami.”
  • “In 1996 the National Labor Committee, a human rights group, reported that sweatshop labor was being used to make clothes for the Kathie Lee line, sold at Wal-Mart.”
  • “Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford raised the money to build and continue to financially support two shelters in New York City for babies born with HIV or a congenital crack cocaine addiction. These shelters were named in honor of her children, Cody and Cassidy.”
  • “In 2008, Gifford and David Friedman wrote a junior high school musical entitled Key Pin It Real. The play depicts a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Key Pin.”

So before you force another stranger to make awkward conversation with you about the temperature of the room you are in ("It feels just right in here!") take a minute to read and memorize these and other key facts from the Kathie Lee Gifford Wikipedia article. You—and your future spouse ;)—will be glad you did.

(We encourage you to get the article fresh off the vine at Wikipedia, but have included screenshots of the entry as it appeared at 3 o’clock Tuesday afternoon, in case any nefarious lotharios edit it to fuck up your game.)

[Image via Getty]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.