Your Own Personal Cyrano

A few winters ago, while I was in California visiting friends and family, my friend Ellen asked me if I could meet her for coffee before I flew back to New York. She had recently gotten engaged and was in the process of building a wedding website.

“You are much better with words than I am, and I was wondering if you could tell the story of how my fiancé and I met, and how he proposed?” she asked.

“Yes, of course, I would love to do this for you,” I said, and I spent the next hour listening to Ellen tell their story, occasionally interrupting to clarify and unearth specific details.

I read over my notes on the flight back to New York, and then spent a weekend weaving together their story — treating it like any other story assignment. When I sent it off to Ellen, she was enthused: “We’re framing this,” she said. The account would be posted as “Our Story” on their wedding website, with no mention that I had written it. I was, essentially, a ghostwriter.

When friends discovered that I was the one who had written their engagement story, one of the first things they asked me was how much I had charged to do it.

“Well,” I said. “Nothing?”

“Your time is money!”

“And I suppose I’ve gifted them that time as an engagement present.”

But I thought about that question later on — how much would someone even charge to do such a thing?

One answer came this weekend from Bruce Feiler’s Times story on wedding ghostwriters. Feiler leads his story with a 32-year-old real estate lawyer named Tom Ruggiero who was asked to give a toast at the wedding of two of his friends — with the awkward fact that the soon-to-be-wed couple had met when the bride was already married. Ruggiero turned to a professional speech writing company for help:

After a Google search turned up a company in Brooklyn called Oratory Laboratory, Mr. Ruggiero started working with a founder, Victoria Wellman. She sent him a detailed questionnaire (Q: “Some people like to meditate to relax, some people like to kickbox, what can Ben be found doing to calm the nerves?”), forwarded him a draft two weeks later for feedback, then met him in person to hone his delivery.

Mr. Ruggiero was thrilled with the outcome. “She really went into what it means to love someone even though it might be a precarious situation,” he said. “People were talking about my speech the whole wedding.”

These ghostwriting “toast whisperers” charge $500 and up; Ruggiero paid $1,000.

Perhaps I’ll add “toast whisperer” to my list of backup careers.

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