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Words escape you? Buy them on Web
By Jeordan Legon
(CNN) -- The best man raises his wine glass -- and out comes a drunken diatribe. It's a wedding couple's nightmare, but a growing number of love birds are shielding themselves from such fiascoes by having Web sites ghostwrite the perfect toast. For the right price, dozens of sites promise to find the right words for just about any occasion: political rallies, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, funerals, even corporate pitches. But toasts for the happy couple are the most frequent requests. "People don't know where to start, so they start with us," said Niamh Crowe, 58, a mother of five whose site, www.Speech-Writers.com, has sold everything from pep talks to eulogies since 1995. "Time is one of the biggest constraints nowadays. So we make it easy for them." Many of Crowe's speeches brim with humor and earthy wisdom. There are so many that Crowe, who used to run a one-woman shop from her home in Ireland, now has a bevy of freelance writers at her disposal. Together, they have whipped up hundreds of canned speeches, available for as little as $25: employee orientations, retirement parties, charity dinners, award presentations, September 11 anniversaries, even toasts for Spanish-speaking weddings. For those wanting a more personal touch, Crowe will interview the customer and write the speech for them for $95 per minute. A ten-minute speech would run about $950. Just in time for the happy dayToo steep a price for John Costello from Tigard, Oregon. When he and his best man, Greg Zuffrea, found themselves without a toast days before the blessed event, they shelled out $65 so another site, InstantWeddingToasts.com, would write the speech for them.
"We filled out their questionnaire Thursday night and by Saturday morning, the speech was in my e-mail," said Costello, 46. Just in time for Zuffrea to draw raves from many of the 80 wedding guests for his funny, pithy speech. "It was like in the movies," Costello said. "He said exactly the right thing." But is buying a toast on the Web the right thing to do? Marjorie Brody, author of "Professional Impressions... Etiquette for Everyone, Every Day," said she's all for it, as long as the message is personalized. "I've attended too many weddings where the best man ... had good sentiment, but they didn't know how to string two sentences together," she said. And she doesn't think speakers should have to fess up when they receive compliments either. "I don't think you should tell people that you bought it," she said. "You could say, 'I had help writing it.'" Business is boomingReal-life couple Rick and Heather Pieczonka started InstantWeddingToasts.com after witnessing one too many best man speeches bomb. The Mesa, Arizona, couple say business is booming. About 60 percent of their customers are best men. But the maid of honor, the bride's father and even the couple themselves have been known to shop their site. "They are your memories, your thoughts, your ideas," said Rick Pieczonka, 27. "All we do is take what's coming from you and put it down on paper." Heather Pieczonka, 28, who used the severance money from a job at Motorola to start the business, now has so many requests she hired four employees. She says the best part of her job is getting thank you notes. "I love reading that their speech went over wonderful," she said. "It's neat to help people out."
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