Joint Speech From Two Maids of Honor (Funny, About 3.5 Minutes)

The speech

Seren: Hi, everyone. I'm Seren, Yara's sister.

Neve: And I'm Neve, Yara's best friend from college.

Seren: We're both maids of honor. Yara could not choose between us, which is fine. It was an easy choice, and she made the wrong one.

Neve: We agreed to share this speech fairly. Seren wrote the first draft. I deleted most of it.

Seren: We want to talk about the lemon cake.

Neve: If you have known Yara for more than a month, you have eaten the lemon cake.

Seren: She made it for the first time when she was fourteen, for our dad's birthday. It came out of the oven tall and gold and perfect, and then, while we watched, the middle sank about two inches. It looked like a little lemon crater.

Neve: She made it for our first floor meeting freshman year. It sank.

Seren: She made it for my graduation. It sank.

Neve: She made it when I got my first apartment, and she carried it up four flights of stairs, and it sank on the third flight. I heard it.

Seren: By our count she has made it sixty-one times. It has sunk sixty-one times. She has never once changed the recipe.

Neve: I asked her about this. She said, "The recipe is right. The oven is wrong." She has had seven ovens.

Seren: For the record, I have eaten forty of those cakes.

Neve: That's not a contest.

Seren: I'm just saying, forty.

Neve: Here is the thing about the cake, though. Yara makes it when somebody needs something. A new job, a bad week, a move, a funeral. She shows up with that cake, crater and all, and she sets it on the counter like it's the most normal thing in the world. And not one person in all those years has ever minded the middle.

Seren: Then there was the first family dinner with Bodhi.

Neve: I wasn't there, so this part is Seren's.

Seren: Thank you. Yara brought out the cake. It sank right there on the table, in front of him, during the candles. Our mom made a face. Yara made a face. And Bodhi leaned over, looked into the crater, and said, "Oh, good. That's where the frosting goes."

Neve: He now makes the frosting. He does it every single time, and he fills the middle right to the top.

Seren: Bodhi, we have argued for years about which of us knows Yara best. You settled it in one sentence. It's you.

Neve: We are both a little upset about this.

Seren: Please raise your glasses.

Neve: To Yara and Bodhi.

Seren: Fill in the middle.

Why it works: The rivalry gives two speakers a reason to trade lines, and the sunken cake gives them one shared object. The groom wins the argument for both of them with a single sentence.