On the next selected shorts, a sister meets her brother's new girlfriend.

Pleased to meet you.

She kisses Jack full on the mouth and then she says she thinks she's coming down with something.

Juliana Margulies reads a rueful and funny story she says she thinks she's coming down with something.

Juliana Margulies reads a rueful and funny story by Melissa Bank.

I'm Meg Wallitzer. Stay with us.

You're listening to Selected Shorts,

where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction,

one short story at a time.

Tangle is such a great word. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is both active, twist together into a confused mass, or descriptive, a confused mass of something twisted together. Either way, the implication is messy, but possibly also alluring and tantalizing. Tangled branches may be something

you want to avoid, and it's certainly a nuisance when all the chains on your necklaces or the

cords on your headphones get jumbled together. But working your way through a good bowl of sesame noodles might be just the thing.

With a definition that broad, we could have featured just about any kind of relationship.

But for this show, we're focusing on unexpected encounters that end up affecting a character's life in some unusual or enduring way.

So no matter what the outcome, they are forever tangled. One story takes the idea of chance

encounter to its limits. A second ponderes the relationship between sin and redemption. And in the

third, we see what happens when one sibling makes a bad choice the

other has to live with. And all of these performances came from a live selected shorts show

that I had the pleasure of hosting. It was a thrilling evening of great actors reading

mesmerizing fiction in front of a packed house at Symphony Space. While I always enjoy talking to you from the confines of my cozy recording studio,

the adrenaline ran high that night on stage in the theater as the actors interpreted the

stories and the audience responded.

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