Short Maid of Honor Speech for a Best Friend (2 Minutes)

The speech

Hi, everyone. I'm Lumi. Alba and I met at nineteen, when we were assigned a dorm room with one window that never closed all the way.

I have one story. Sophomore year, in February, the heat in our building broke for nine days. Alba decided we were not going to be miserable about it. She borrowed a waffle iron from two girls down the hall, set it on her desk, and made waffles every night at ten, because she had read somewhere that a waffle iron could heat a small room.

It cannot. But we sat on her bed in our coats, eating waffles with our gloves on, and by the fourth night half the floor was crammed in there with us, and nobody was thinking about the cold anymore.

That is Alba. When something breaks, she doesn't complain. She plugs something in and invites people over.

Florence, I knew about you at Alba's birthday last spring. The power went out in your apartment halfway through dinner. You had every candle in the place lit before anyone could say a word. You moved the cake to the middle of the table and said, "Well, now it's a party." Alba looked at me across the table, and I just nodded. She had found someone who does the waffle thing too.

So please raise your glasses. To Alba and Florence. May the heat always work, and when it doesn't, make waffles.

Why it works: It has exactly one story and lets it do all the work. The turn to the partner is a second, smaller scene that rhymes with the first, so the toast lands without explanation.