This is quite an embarrassing story.

So the other night, I was at a bar, and this girl opened me, by grabbing my arm, turning my body to face her, and then asked me "how old are you?"
Having never held a conversation at a bar before (yeah, I don't go to bars), I was just shocked, and mumbled, "uh...why do you ask?".
At that point, my mind was so blank I forgot how she even responded, but I eventually told her I was 23, in an awkward manner.
She then asked me if I went to USC, when I actually graduated from UCLA recently. I again blanked out, and told her yeah I went to UCLA actually, and she told me she did too. At that point, I was so busy trying to think of witty things to say that i was sweating balls, and then was mentally dying to get out of the conversation, so I just basically gave her the message that "i gotta go" and walked away.

Yeah. If you want to beat me up for this, don't worry, I've been doing that to myself for the past 3 days since then.
I confided in two of my close friends, who without even thinking, came up with responses 100 times better than what I did. "USC? No way, I went to the better school across the street" "My age? Maybe we discuss about it during dinner tomorrow"

At this point, I was chucking mental boulders at myself for being so retarded. I've had a lot of missed opportunities like this where girls smile and say hi to me and all that good stuff, but let's just say I've only kissed two girls in my life, and they were my ex's that PERSISTENTLY hit on me.

So I guess my questions are,
1) How do I develop my sense of wit?
and/or
2) How can I still perform without having that wit? Was there a way to work the conversation without being clever?

I`m actually kind of like you. I get this situations all lot whereby I just blank out. Its annoying that as soon as the opporturnities go I could think of many different things to say. My question would also be what should we do? memorise lines?

On the subject of being witty I just try to be cocky/ Funnny but it does not come to me naturally hence I am also struggling.

You can talk slower... when someone catch you unprepared just smile first and say something stupid/funny ... "wow you really got me unprepared" sounds better than "mmm,well...ahhh..."

The trick is while saying what you are saying think of the answer... you got 2-3 sec (thats enough) kuz at least that long should take "laugh + wow you really got me unprepared"...

You could even say something like "slow dont missy but in funny way with smile"... just to buy yourself some time to think of the answer .

Yeah I suppose I really need to learn to relax. I get so stressed out from the start and things get progressively worse and then i get MORE stressed. It's like the moment I talk to a girl, it's a downward spiral of stress and idiotic comments.

I need to flip that somehow and make it an upward spiral.

I never tried memorizing lines before because I feel that I want to do it the natural way. But then I thought that maybe I need to have some sort of structure set with memorizing before I can work my own natural game. Sucks that I have terrible memory.