Is there such a thing as binge shopping? Would you take better care of your clothes if you knew who made them?

How can you escape in a pair of shoes you can't walk in?

On this selected shorts, we offer answers to these questions.

I'm Meg Walitzer.

Stay with me. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. The three works on this

program offer three unusual perspectives on clothes and fashion, selling, making,

and buying. In one a saleswoman becomes a compulsive consumer. In the second, we hear

about a role in the garment industry that's usually overlooked. In the third, shopping is an

antidote to aging.

When I think about going clothes shopping with my friends when I was young,

usually to buy something called a Huckapoo blouse, don't ask but I loved them,

I think about the mall we went to, the Walt Whitman

Mall, which probably explains why I am a writer. Is there a greater oxymoron than

the Walt Whitman Mall? I've tried to come up with one for you and here it is, the

Edna St. Vincent Malay Water Park.

Our first story is by the pithy and provocative Irish writer Anne Enwright.

She's the author of 11 novels including actress and The Gathering,

which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

and story collections including Yesterday's weather. She owns everything is a sort of

retail-based tragic comedy. An ordinary saleswoman at a Dublin department store

is the obliging docile instrument of other people's

...