Welcome to strangers. I'm Leah Tao.

And you know, when you produce a program called strangers, people often say, oh, about the people we meet and fateful encounters, things like that.

And I say, well, it's also about the ways we can be strangers to ourselves, or to the people we thought we were closest to.

It's about the transformations we go through and the strange places we travel to.

So it's really much broader than that.

But sometimes it is about a faithful encounter, and today's story is one of those.

It's about two people who meet in a random place at a random time and wind up affecting

each other's lives in a major way. It is also about how far we'll go to help another.

I'm Cora Layton. I'm a professor at Berkeley City College. I have a PhD in communication.

But 11 years ago, I was living in L.A. and getting my M.A. and working as a stripper, trying to

maintain my life as a grad student and my life as a stripper and my life as a cocaine addict,

all these various lives that didn't seem to fit well together.

A lot of people started dying.

My coworker died in a car crash.

My cousin died in a motorcycle accident.

A good friend committed suicide. And it was like nine people in six months. And then my sort of boyfriend, we had taken a break.

We were having rocky times, so we took a couple weeks off, and we were supposed to talk that upcoming Saturday and Friday night.

He died of a drug overdose in the arms of another woman.

I never got any closure on that.

It was this weird kind of just he was gone.

So I was working as an exotic dancer, although there was nothing exotic about it, in the

valley at a bar called the Classy Lady, which was not appropriately named. It was your typical

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