On this week's selected shorts, we offer up a little help in all kinds of shape, sizes, and places.

Families and friends are our usual support systems, but what about the stranger who returns your lost wallet,

or the sibling who keeps helping when you wish they wouldn't?

I'm Meg Walletzer. Is a friend in need a friend indeed? Stay with me. We'll find out.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

You know that song by that group that had those mop-top haircuts?

The song that goes, I get by with a little help for my friends.

Or if you don't know that group, maybe you do know that commercial where the woman says,

I've fallen and I can't get up, and help is on the way. Well, on this selected shorts, we're borrowing that idea and adding parents, siblings, or sometimes mysterious strangers, to our own personal mixtape. The stories on this program look at what it means to be helped or to offer help. Is it an action in response to a need, an intuitive response to something unexpressed, a supportive atmosphere, or an unwanted intrusion? Our quartet of writers

helps us to find out. Coming up in this hour, a daughter tests the boundaries of elder care,

a lonely woman connects in a new city, dance partners,

change partners, and lives. And mom's got your back, whether you like it or not.

Many of us are part of what's been dubbed the sandwich generation, often raising kids and caring

for aging parents at the same time, and sometimes making sandwiches for them both because a good

PBJ crosses generations.

This can sometimes be a strain, but other times the Reader's Digest is right.

Laughter is the best medicine. Young listener, Reader's Digest? Laughter is the best medicine?

What is she talking about? To which I say, Google it. And while you're there, Google, I am Joe's

liver. It's worth it. Enter Jenny Allen's How to Take Dad to the Doctor. Alan is a writer and

performer whose works include the collection, The Long Chalkboard, and other stories, and most recently,

would everybody please stop? Her writing has been featured in several anthologies, including the

50 funniest American writers edited by Andy Borowitz and selected shorts' own Small Odyssey's.

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