Enough flying by the seat of your pants. Look at the road ahead, get organized, and make a plan for once.

Then all you have to do is sit back and execute that plan.

Simple, right?

I'm Meg Walitzer.

Stay with us as we take on fiction for the meticulous and makeshift alike.

You're listening to selected shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through

the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

Our program today is called Best Laid Plans, which is a reference to a poem by Scotsman Robert Burns.

I'm not even going to attempt a Scottish brogue here, despite having watched Highlander,

but the line goes like this.

The best-laid schemes on mice and men gang aftaglay.

The idea has subsequently been borrowed by John Steinbeck and your grandmother,

and there's probably a clever kind of literary exterminator

out there whose company is called of mice and men.

But you don't need to know the history of the phrase to understand its implications.

All of us have crafted meticulous schemes

to ensure that things turn out right for us in those we love.

Maybe you've been plotting a vacation or a wedding,

or who knows, a corporate takeover.

Organizing these kinds of events takes focus and commitment.

And yet, like the wee sleeket mouse whose life is upended in Burns' poem to a mouse, we often find our expectations

disappointed. What comes after that? Well, that's what we'll explore in the stories on this show.

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