Peas in a pod, a meeting of the minds, twinning.

When you find that perfect match, it's exhilarating.

I'm Meg Wallitzer, and on today's selected shorts,

fiction from writers including Dorothy Parker about being cut from the same cloth,

and what happens when the seams rip? You're listening to selected shorts, where our greatest

actors transport us through the magic of fiction, oh, half a billion of them, and really truly connect with, conservatively, say, 500,000? That's just math. I mean,

the kind of math you'd expect from a novelist. Still, it seems like with all those people out there,

meeting your kind of people shouldn't be that hard. But as we all know, finding friends,

partners, or colleagues you genuinely admire is no simple feat.

It takes time and effort to find people with whom you can share inside jokes and secret hopes.

And when we find them, well, we first have to recognize their value and later decide how hard we want to work in order to keep them in our lives.

That's what this episode of Selected Shorts considers. People who find someone with whom they

really connect. Some hold fast, some lose touch, and some try to find their way back to one another.

One Dorothy Parker classic is about two old friends who never heard

about the pot that called the kettle black. Another story presents a lesser-known right in modern

relationships, the breakup ceremony, and a third story is about twins discovering one another,

as if for the first time. Let's begin with Dorothy Parker, the famed

20th century poet, journalist, screen, and short storywriter. Her wicked wit permeated everything

she did, including collections such as enough rope. This piece, which features the kind of

vapid socialites Parker often satirized in her work,

is something of a dialogue.

So we invited two great actors to read it together.

...