My many-hyphenate friend Maria—a Chinese-Cuban artiste-fashionista—emailed yesterday with an 11th-hour relationship dilemma:

Re: Help

What are some good topics or questions I can ask during a date if it goes into that awkward silence moment? I'm going out with a Wall Street type, and I'm sure he knows nothing of Latin art and fashion, and I definitely don't know crap about money!

A quick survey of the tangomag.com offices turned up the following:

Sports: What's his favorite hometown team?
News: Was what Spitzer did amoral or perfectly normal?
Ego Boost: Can he explain the whole foreclosure issue to l'il ole you?
Travel: What country is on his dream list to visit?
Food: What was his favorite breakfast cereal as a kid? What's his favorite comfort food? What's his favorite restaurant?
Tech/Time Wastage: What's his guilty pleasure web site?

Okay, it wasn't exactly a controlled experiment, but Maria had exactly t minus 10 minutes till cocktail hour.

According to the postmortem, here's what worked:

"I ended up using two of your topics. We talked about the foreclosure topic, and then when we left to go to another place I asked him what his favorite pub was, and suggested that we could go there. (That is another story too!) Overall the date went well until the awkward good-bye. You were right: he complimented me and told me I looked great. There were no awkward moments of conversation, we talked all night."

Next up on Love Buzz? How to avoid awkward goodbyes.