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The toast at the wedding

Three minutes at the microphone in front of ninety people, of whom half are crying already, is the hardest short speech in family life, and I have now done it twice, once for each daughter, and both times the machine was the rehearsal room. What it is good at is the part nobody warns you about, the editing down. Your daughter's whole childhood wants in, and three minutes holds 380 words, and the arithmetic of what to cut is brutal. The method that worked. Talk at the program first, ten minutes, everything, the story about her organizing the neighborhood circus at nine, the nursing school years, the way he looks at her. Then ask for the shape, opening line, one story, one story, the welcome to the new son, the closing line, 350 words, warm, no jokes that require explanation. The draft it returns is not the speech. It is the dough. Then three passes, and this is where the machine earns it. Shorter, you keep the circus story, cut the apartment flooding story. Now make the last line land harder without becoming a greeting card. Now read it aloud, and mark every place my mouth stumbles, and fix those places. The stumbling test is the real one, because a toast is spoken, not read, and your mouth finds the problems your eyes forgive. Both times I rehearsed against the kitchen clock eleven times until it was muscle, and both times the speech was the thing people mentioned at brunch. The stories were mine. The discipline was borrowed. Three minutes goes by like a wave, and you want to be riding it, not reading it.

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