Welcome to strangers from KCW's Independent Producer Project and StoleyCentral.org.

My name is Leah Tau, and I don't know about you, but I've never particularly envied people who are born rich.

I think I've always felt that if I didn't have the need to hustle

and struggle, some existential void would open up in me that had the potential to swallow me whole.

You know, I mean, did I love working in restaurants through high school and college and grad school? No. Did I fantasize

about the day when I could throw down the apron in the middle of a busy Saturday night and walk

out when the manager was being a jerk? Yeah, I did. But somewhere deep inside, I knew that it was a huge

gift for me that this wasn't a matter of choice.

And I've always wondered how people survive this unbearable lightness of being, when nothing

is a matter of necessity.

So for today's episode, I went to talk to some rich people about their lives.

Three of them were born to wealth, and one, the musician Moby, grew up dirt poor,

but is now rich. What we're doing today is a bit different from what we often do here on

strangers, where the stories have some big emotional arc. Today's stories are vignettes that show

four different experiences of wealth. Our first storyteller is Paul Lejeandra, who grew up not so long

ago, but very much in a world of yore. Mummy grew up in New York at 90-702nd Street in a fabulous house

and had fabulous parties. I mean, they were very glamorous.

Philip Barry wrote Holiday about them.

Holidays based on Mommy, Aunt Janie, and Uncle Addie.

It was a wonderful play, and then it was a movie.

When Mommy and Daddy got married,

they wanted to have a place in South Carolina.

...