California, friends, we're coming your way.

Please join us at a live performance of selected shorts

with three of our favorite actors,

Jane Kasmaric, Joshua Molina, and Kirsten Vangzness.

We'll be at the McCallom Theater for the Performing Arts in the

Palm Springs area on Sunday, February 4th at 3 p.m. We've got a great afternoon of

hilarious moving and captivating short stories about old Hollywood.

Here's looking at you, kid. Go to micalum theater.org or selected shorts.org for tickets and information. Have you ever had a friend of me?

Have you ever had a friend of me?

You know the kind of friend who made you a friendship bracelet but won't invite you to her secret birthday party.

And that's when she said it.

I wish I liked you more.

Then she switched on the radio.

I'm Meg Walitzer, and if this sounds familiar,

stay with me for selected shorts

for fiction about contradictory characters. So yes, I'm Meg and I'm the host of Shorts, but I'm also a writer and a New Yorker and a mother and a wife and a grandmother and a friend and an ambidextrous person and I'm also Jewish and an American and a devotee of Scrabble.

The point is, I'm not just one thing, and I don't think that you are either.

All of us play many different roles in one another's lives and in the world around us.

And sometimes, frankly, it can be hard to keep up with all those different roles,

not to mention all of the feelings that go along

with playing all these parts.

Some days we do what we know to be right, like becoming the angelic godmother, following

...