Chapter 1: What themes are explored in the stories presented?
Charles Dickens brought us that little scamp Pip with all of his great expectations. But what if you don't have the loyal chums or a mysterious benefactor, and you happen to have a head full of snakes instead of hair? I'm Meg Wolitzer, and coming up, twisty tales told by characters with modest expectations. Stay with us.
You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. As a human, it's hard not to get your hopes up. We're hardwired to get them way up, really.
Whether it's imagining what treasures are hidden in that bin at the garage sale across the street, or dreaming about what our lives might be like by the time we're 40, we don't really limit ourselves. If we didn't dream big dreams, it'd make the future seem a lot less bright. The problem is disappointment and what to do with it if things don't quite turn out how we imagined.
Well, so let's try something. In the next hour, we're going to hear stories that present a kind of thought experiment. And that experiment is, what if we kept our outsized optimism in a more reasonable place? What if, unlike Pip in the Dickens classic, we had less than great, even modest expectations? Today's program explores the pros and cons of carefully tempered expectations.
In one story, a mythological monster ages into her resting witch face. In another, hesitant parents consider upgrading their kids' online lives. In a third, a young woman aims for cool around the boys of summer. And in the final piece, two strangers let dreams blossom and wither during a chance meeting at a flower shop.
This program was also co-curated by our friends in the online collective Bellatrist and the Bellatrist Book Club. For those who don't know it, well, first, Bellatrist is a French word for a writer whose work is beautiful or artistic rather than academic. The Bellatrist Book Club is the vibrant online community built by two longtime friends, actor Emma Roberts and producer Cara Price.
As bookworms, they regularly shared recommendations and wanted to expand their circle as they passed their favorite new reads back and forth. As big admirers of the Bellatrist community and their incredible author picks, we asked Price and Roberts to help us curate and host two shows at the Getty, and they said yes.
Today's show, The Stories and the Actors You'll Hear, are a direct result of our collaboration with Bellatrist. Here are Price and Roberts having a bit of fun prepping the audience on how to listen to Selected Shorts. Here's a little bit of an intro.
Selected Shorts is literature performed live.
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Chapter 2: How does the story 'Medusa' reinterpret a classic myth?
She lay down in the water and propped her head against the tub, the snakes spreading and sipping until they fell asleep. When she stepped out of the tub, the snakes didn't lift away from her scalp. They didn't pull and writhe in 37 directions, didn't fill her head with their sound. They lay limp as 37 braids, but heavier the way children are heavier when they sleep.
There followed a blissful period of lovemaking and spooning and driving through the countryside with the windows down. The snakes draped over her headrest to give her hairline a break. With her lover's encouragement, she put away her head wraps and entered a new phase of freedom and self-discovery. As she grew infatuated with him, the snakes grew infatuated with the bath bombs.
She convinced herself that this was for the good. I mean, weren't they always trying to escape the head wrap? Especially Hector, her favorite, who was always futzing through a gap in the fabric, the first to wake in the mornings, nuzzling her eyebrow in an effort to wake her too. These days, upon waking, the snakes were miserably hungover, hissing like 37 fuses until she took a very long bath.
In time, she and her lover developed an ease between them. Occasionally, he got on her nerves, like when he wiped his face sweat on her bath towel and talked about fake news. Or when he bought her a pull-up bar as a spontaneous gift, even though she'd never shown interest in doing a pull-up. Sometimes she considered relocating to another town, eluding her lover and her assassin at once.
One evening, as she and her lover were watching a movie at her place, Hector fell out of her head. He lay stiffening in her lap, his eyes tight as stitches. She touched the stretch of skin he'd left behind on her scalp, smooth as if he'd never been. The others went on sleeping. She looked at her lover. What have you done? What you wanted, he said, shrinking into the couch. Right?
She closed her eyes and felt the ancient trembling in her chest, the blood ticking in her ears, the living snakes beginning to stir. Get out, she said. Her lover left in a hurry, taking the pull-up bar with him. For a long time, she did not move, only held the snake in her upturned palms.
In the morning, the snakes that remained jerked her toward the tub, uninterested in the pain they caused her, selfish in their dying. If they had to die, they wanted to die in the tub. By the third day, all the snakes had fallen out and turned to bone. She buried the bone snakes in her garden.
In the night wind, her head felt cold and exposed, and though the snakes were gone, she could feel a twitching from the inside of her scalp, a phantom warning to flee. But what was the point? Her power had fizzled out, her scream gone silent, So she began to leave her doors unlocked and windows open day and night, waiting for the end.
Years or months later, she'd lost track of time, she was lying in the tub when her assassin edged his way past the bathroom door, his sickle raised, careful not to look her in the eye. You don't have to do that, she said, her eyes dimmed to slits. You can look. He squinted at her reflection in his shield, then dropped his arms and stared at her. "'What happened to you?' he said.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do parents face with technology in 'We Only Wanted Their Happiness'?
Next up, a story of technology and compromise. Here are Bellatrist co-founders Cara Price and Emma Roberts introducing it from the stage.
All right, well, next is a story from Andrew Weinstein. Kara and I are huge fans of Alexander's collection, Children of a New World, and we wanted to find a way to incorporate him into this show. His story, Saying Goodbye to Yang, was turned into an A24 movie after Yang.
So Weinstein's work has always kind of struck us as literary black mirror with a grounded soul, and this story is no exception. Reading tonight's story is the wildly charming actor who you know from series including Fresh Off the Boat, WandaVision, and movies such as Always Be My Maybe. He also recently released his directorial debut, Shortcomings, which everybody should see.
Now performing, We Only Wanted Their Happiness, and I'm just going to warn you, this story is going to fuck with you. Now performing, We Only Wanted Their Happiness by Alexander Weinstein, please welcome Randall Park.
We never should have opened our hearts to their tears, but how can you say no to your children? And when they asked why, we told them it was dangerous. They were only 5, 8, 10. They were kids. Wasn't it enough that they had their smartphones, their tablets, their laptops, their virtual reality consoles, their screens upon screens upon screens? But our children kept asking.
Every birthday when they unwrapped their gifts full of more electronics, we saw their disappointment. Why can't they have it, they asked, over breakfast, over lunch, over dinner. They asked when we picked them up from school or went grocery shopping. And we spent hours repeating our reasons, only to be asked again when we tucked them into bed at night.
Maybe in retrospect we agreed simply to get them to stop asking. One could always have it removed, we reasoned. And we turned to our husbands and wives, our companions who should have stopped us, but they too were exhausted from all of the pleading. Most days were spent checking texts with the addiction of chain smokers or searching for funny gifts as if seeking the Holy Grail.
At the end of the day, all we wanted was a couple hours of uninterrupted scrolling. And so we printed out appointment confirmations and placed them inside gift boxes on our children's birthdays. or the gifts were bought for our kids by grandparents. We know it's expensive, our parents told us, but we wanted to spoil them. And then what could we do?
When our children unwrapped their presents, their faces were illuminated as if discovering a kitten. The surgery was painless as promised. A small handheld injector no larger than a pocket flashlight was pressed to our children's temples. Count to three, the technician instructed. One, two. Our children winced, a couple tears appeared in the corner of their eyes, and then it was done.
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Chapter 4: How does infatuation manifest in 'Good Boys'?
Please, we said, we just want a moment with you.
Ha!
They laughed and told us they'd placed filters over our faces. We suddenly had giraffe ossicones, cat ears, and dog noses. Now we had horse teeth, now fish lips. Speech bubbles emerged from our mouths when we told our kids to please turn off their browsers. It was time for dinner. They couldn't even hear what we were saying. They turned our voices into bird chirps.
Please, we asked them again, aware of the helplessness in our voices. We need you to turn off your connections. And finally, they blinked their eyes and told us they had. But when they giggled during dinner, how could we be sure they'd closed anything down? Then all of a sudden, our children fell silent.
We watched as they crouched in the middle of the carpeting for hours, entertained by nothing, it seemed. They sat alone in their rooms, their hands building invisible castles. When we asked them once, twice, three times what they were doing, they told us with frustration, please be quiet. We are trying to concentrate. Our houses became silent again and our children stopped asking for things.
only for our credit cards, which they needed to purchase upgrades. No, we said. Please, they asked. No, we repeated. We weren't about to put our credit card numbers into the ether. But they cried, and they yelled at us, and when they wouldn't relent, we finally read the numbers off our cards and gave them expiration dates.
We tried to tell our children about the benefits of having at least some offline time, an hour or two, even a couple minutes, just to take a walk, to ride a bicycle, to play in the snow or watch springtime lightning storms. We printed up contracts with consequences for spending too long online, had our children sign on dotted lines, forced them to make promises which were never fulfilled.
We begged, we pleaded, they told us they understood, and then they went back into their rooms to build invisible cities. Their grades plummeted. All their homework was in the ether, and we watched them moving their hands in the air, looking no different than when they were playing online games. It sure didn't seem like math, but it was impossible to check. We petitioned the school.
Could we go back to pen and paper? Stay with tablets and laptops? We were patiently listened to by their kindly educators who all nodded with their implanted heads. They smiled at us with illuminated eyes and shared the good news. Our school's STEM program had just received a grant for low-income implantation. Philanthropically-minded tech foundations would be offering free online textbooks.
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Chapter 5: What unique relationship dynamics are depicted in 'Arrangements'?
Zoe laughs like Tinkerbell, the air whistling between the gaps in her teeth. She's definitely not a dog. I know we're high up, and I know our lives would be ruined if one of the boys fell, but tall plants are growing on the edge of the rooftop, and I can't see the cobblestones anymore.
If I could see that little cobblestone street in the boy's little smart car, it would be easier to imagine them falling. It would be easier to remember that I'm in Paris. It would be easier to laugh like Zoe, like Tinkerbell, like a real girl, a girl who is not a dog. I can't see the Pantheon or the observatory or the park.
I can see only the boys and their tan stomachs and the scrapes they got from falling off the moped. We could be anywhere. We could be back in New York or near my house in L.A. or at some Airbnb in Berlin. I'd like to go to Berlin to dance with the boys at Burgain, to eat knafeh with Zoe, to see the Reichstag or whatever, but the boys don't want to go. Athens is the New Berlin.
In Athens, the cigarettes are cheap. I thought Krakow was the New Berlin. The boys laugh and they shake their heads and I can smell their wet puppy dog hair. The sun is setting and the sky is so pink. Pink like the canopy bed I never got. Like Kirby. Like peonies. Like the cheeks of a girl who the boys have just called a dog.
I stand at the edge of the rooftop holding my phone just above the plants. trying to take a photo, trying not to drop it. The boys tell me that if I want to post something on Instagram, they'll text me a Greek sunset. I'm not going to post anything. It's just for my grandma. They want me to show her a Greek sunset. All their grandmas are dead. In Greece, the sky gets even pinker, like way pinker.
The Greeks have four words for sunset, one for each of the boys. Tomorrow, they leave to work on their barbed wire sculptures at some studio space in Normandy, but tonight, we're in Paris, but all they want to talk about is Greece. They wish they could have stayed, stayed away from Paris, from Normandy, from Bennington and Bard, from the rooftop, from all this. Their moms have ovarian cancer.
Their girlfriends are pregnant again. They're sure to fail a class next semester, but in Greece, none of that matters. In Greece, they sail on boats and they make sketches of naked marble women and they all sleep in one king-size bed. In Greece, they touch sculptures of gods. In Greece, they put their art, history, education to good use. In Greece, they were happy. We want them to be happy.
We let them tell us about the olives and the stray cats and the monks and the night they crashed the moped and the windmills and the dead dolphin and the economy. I wanna ask them how many dogs they saw, but then again, I don't really care. Dogs are girls who care. Girls who ask too many questions are dogs. Dogs comment on how high the ceilings are.
Dogs wanna know who this rooftop really belongs to. Dogs ask what your dads do for work. Dogs post sunsets on Instagram. Dogs throw up when they drink tequila. Dogs beg for games of rooftop tennis. Dogs ask where the Eiffel Tower is. Dogs wear too much perfume because dogs stink. Dogs get mad when the boys kiss me or Zoe. Dogs don't know how to keep it casual. Dogs whine.
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Chapter 6: How do the characters manage their expectations throughout the stories?
Dogs don't want the boys to be happy. Dogs want to be held after sex, to be petted, to be taken care of. Dogs make a big deal when you get them pregnant. Dogs don't know how to just take care of it while you're with your boys in Greece. Dogs are too loud. Dogs get excited too fast. Dogs need you. Dogs just don't get it. Dogs don't get to hang out on the roof. It's too high. They're too wild.
They might fall. And then we'd actually have to catch them or something.
That was Good Boys by Honor Levy, performed by Annie Hamilton. While Levy's language becomes a kind of heightened refrain, she hits on a feeling I think we can all relate to. That time you tried to be cool around those people you wanted to impress and only ended up disappointing yourself. Still, I sense that the narrator won't remain on the rooftop for long.
She's too thoughtful, too energetic, too ready to become her own person. When we return, strangers in a flower shop let their relationship bloom, each on their own terms. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to Selected Shorts, recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back.
This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. This week, our stories are about modest expectations. That is, the perks and pitfalls of keeping your hopes at a manageable level. Our final story in this program, Arrangements, is by writer Charlie Watts.
Watts has been publishing in journals including The Drum and Narrative, while the story itself won Carve magazine's Raymond Carver contest in 2015. Arrangements is told from two distinct perspectives, so it felt right to invite two actors to read it. Laura Harrier has featured in films including Spider-Man, Homecoming, and White Men Can't Jump.
And Will Harrison has appeared in movies such as This Is a Film About My Mother and series including Daisy Jones and the Six. And together, Harrier and Harrison make a terrific pair in Arrangements by Charlie Watts. Just a heads up for parents of younger children, there is a brief instance of adult behavior.
To her, the man standing in the center of her flower shop resembled a brightly painted piñata. She had the immediate sense that if she were to beat him open with a small bat, there would be nothing inside but strips of Spanish-language newspapers. His pants were cornflower blue, set off by a white shirt so crisp she thought it might be plastic. His skin was glazed. "'Hello.'
To him, the woman tending the store seemed angry. She was jamming big-headed flowers into a metal vase as if they had mistreated her. Her eyes were dark and set closely together. Her gaze was like a punch. She was wearing a sleeveless denim shirt, and on the top of her left shoulder was a tattoo. He could tell it was fresh because the blues and yellows were backlit by swelling.
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Chapter 7: What role does setting play in shaping the narratives?
He looked to her like the kind of man who might run his finger under the waistband of her underwear while they were walking in public, as if it were a gift.
Can I help you? The man looked away from the woman because he felt he might answer incorrectly. He wished again that the office manager had not asked him to get the flowers. But why were they the ones arranging this anyway? He remembered a film from his 10th grade biology class showing the vibration of bees on flowers and the blizzard of pollen, stamens, and pistils.
Now he felt anxious about all the living things around him, as if somehow all these delicate natural miracles were at risk because of the woman's negative energy. He dug his hands into his front pockets and scratched the top of his thighs. It's a funeral.
She had to revise her assessment of this man. Looking at him again as he stood before her, bent forward slightly, hands in his pockets, he was not a piñata. He was a Russian Easter egg. Elaborate and shiny on the outside, but then on the inside, blown out and dangerously hollow. She gets him to be like her in his mid-thirties. The funeral then would be for his mother or his sister, perhaps.
It would be an exception, but perhaps it was for his wife. Yes, he was definitely brittle like you are when the very thing you care for the most is plucked away. I see. I'm so sorry for your loss. Did you have anything specific in mind?
He considered again his sense of this woman. He was wrong about the anger. It was power she was pushing out. And now he could see that the tattoo was actually a group of five wasps headed from different directions at a disfiguration on her skin. A cigarette burn? He imagined that she had done it with another woman, her girlfriend, and this was a mark of solidarity.
You do me and I'll do you, both of them silently crying as the cigarette coals wormed their way through the skin. Her girlfriend would have been pale as snow and the mark on her skin would have been a strawberry stain. I don't know much about flowers.
I don't know what's... The woman turned to the glass top counter and took up her order pad, wondering, who let this guy out on his own? He was a walking coma. It had to be his wife. Had she just blinked out like a burst bulb in the bed next to him?
And then he didn't know what to do, standing over the bed in his wrinkled underwear talking to the 911 operator while the paramedics stormed through the apartment and slapped on the paddles, jumping her body off the bed six, seven, eight times before he finally threw the phone down and told him to stop. Tell me a little about the funeral?
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