Risk! Storytelling Podcast

Three people get taken down a few pegs in front of an audience in this classic RISK! episode, first released in August of 2014 and pulled back into the feed.

Roger Hailes has been an easy mark for humiliation since a hired clown hauled him out from under his bed at his sixth birthday party, and the worst of it arrives years later, at 16, in a parked car. Anne Thomas, a lawyer who is paralyzed, spends a trip home from Madagascar being carried, stranded, and told by Air France that its paperwork is more authoritative than her own...

Two folks try to make love and family work without a road map.

Adam Darrow agreed to an open relationship on a don’t ask, don’t tell basis, and it held up until his wife’s best friend was given six months to live and asked for a foursome before she died. Adam handed over the apartment, flew across the country, and then sat in a coffee shop for an entire day with no phone call and a very loud voice in his head.

Kelli Auerbach was queer, single...

RISK!'s second live Chicago show, back now from August of 2014, nearly came apart from technical trouble and a lineup crisis, but the audience there saved it.

(Content note: child sexual abuse)

Darren Bodecker is ten, on an Air Force base in Spain, when his babysitter explains what best friends are required to do. One move later he passes it along to a nine-year-old, and the town decides who he is.

Mindy Bilderback, uninsured and in a borrowed Omaha basement, wakes with her left eyeball in her palm.

(Content note: suicidal...

Two people, decades and continents apart, are both foreigners in the land they were headed for.

Lucy McCullough is six when her parents’ visas expire and the family needs a country that will take them. She builds her idea of Canada from picture books in an embassy library, then lands in Toronto with a note stapled to her shirt directing a stranger to her classroom.

Later, Sara Aghamohammadi is shopping in Iran in her brightest hijab when a woman in a black chador taps her and her cousin on the shoulder. Where clothing is a po...

Halloween weekend brings back one of RISK!’s eerier classics from November 2013.

Jackson McKeehan, orphaned at seven and still an anxious wreck as an adult, books a session with a psychic medium during the breakdown-adjacent final semester of design school. 

Brett Wean’s college friend Cassie keeps saying, with a totally straight face, that her dead sister lives in her closet, and her boyfriend eventually returns from Christmas at Cassie’s parents’ house with his own matching claim.

(Content note: suicide attempt)

Heidi Galore, four years in as a police officer, answers a...

The eighteenth annual Halloween-tide episode runs from a dark bedroom to a front porch to a burning house.

Larry Dorsey Jr. is eighteen and staying at his girlfriend’s apartment in the projects when a fever comes over him out of nowhere. He lies down beside her, hears footsteps stop in front of the bed, and finds he cannot move or open his right eye.

Aaron Calafato opens his wife’s phone at midnight to find a photo of the delivery driver who took her apple pie instead of leav...

A classic RISK! episode from July 2014 built around three situations that everyone involved would happily have ended earlier.

Sam Mullins is in his final year at the University of Victoria acting program when a midnight phone call reassigns him to a role in a doomed play he was never supposed to have. Winter Tashlin, a BDSM educator, brings home a tube of capsaicin cream from the pharmacy and ignores every safety protocol he teaches in his own class.

Anne Thomas is eighteen, six months after the accident that paralyzed her from the chest down, when...

Ploy Anderson is rushing out of her Bangkok house for a lunch date, a hair roller still clipped under her helmet, when a 10-wheeler drifts into her lane. Abel Athi Kumar is easing into a slow Sunday when his housemate starts screaming by the pond, where a python has his cat Whiskey in its coils. And Art Attaphon, reading alone in a tiny Silom library, opens Grindr for some reason he can't quite identify, and winds up signing a consent form in a stranger’s hotel room.

Three residents of a city where the most ordinary afternoon of...

This week we're revisiting the first RISK! episode ever recorded outside the United States. In July 2014, the show traveled to London for a live event co-produced with Spark.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Dave Pickering heads to a swingers club to test whether the ugliness he's carried since childhood really lines up with reality. Suraya Sidhu Singh steps out of a shower on her first American visit to hear her friend confess that he thinks the neighbor across the hall is dead. Simon Sarginson grows up with a free-spirited mother whose response to cancer is as...

Two RISK! favorites come back for Latine Heritage Month, handed to guests who know the territory. Brenda González & Delsy Sandoval, Latina co-hosts of Tamarindo podcast, join us to talk both stories through and celebrate Latine lives that rarely get to be this light.

Javier Morillo spent his twenties shutting down white men who reduced him to a fantasy. Then country music got its hooks in him, and a conference in Austin put a real cowboy in front of him.

Ximena Ospina is seven when her family leaves Colombia inside a month. She starts first g...

Three of the most memorable stories from the last six months of RISK!, back in one place.

(Content note: gun violence)

Jon Rappoport is on a work call outside Chicago when his wife kicks the door open: their twelve-year-old twins are texting from a mall on lockdown for an active shooter. Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in Los Angeles with a long record of choosing unavailable men, meets someone on a dating app who is funny and spectacular in bed, right up until he asks her not to look him up.

(Content note...

Dug out from the RISK! archives, this June 2014 episode goes straight for the seedier side of growing up, getting by, and getting out alive.

Brian Cirmo spends his last night in downtown Utica the way he and his heavyset childhood crew always did, at the strip clubs, before his friends pull one prank too many and leave him stranded on a corner. Jake Hart lands in New York with a head full of Bukowski, no plan, and no money, and turns a month and a half of homelessness into a running experiment in how low he'll let...

Three people do something small and stupid, then meet the full weight of the law.

Kona Morris spends a four-hour Beijing layover in a customs line that will not move, with a backpack full of rocks and a Tokyo souvenir that reads as an explosive on the X-ray.

Victor Ramirez was 17 in the Poconos when a shoplifting friend told him which Walmart aisle nobody watches, and he built a summer business on it, until his Hells Angel mentor set a tire iron on the table.

Frank Traynor, 14 and in love...

Recorded live at DSI Comedy Theater in Chapel Hill in 2014, this classic RISK! episode brings together three storytellers on the wilder edges of youth.

(Content note: emotional abuse)

Lauren Patton grows up on a Georgia estate where her father runs a criminal law firm out of the house, cycling young mistresses past her mother. At fourteen, she's ordered to take one of them out horseback riding.

Andrew Aghapour arrives at his first teaching gig in three Target polos and fast-food napkins in his armpits, hoping to be the cool philosophy professor. His seventy-student...

Twice a year we gather the best of the best from the last six months. This round holds three.

(Content note: suicide)

At fifteen, Richard Velazquez steps onto a 1986 Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale, carrying the demon-fear of a Jehovah's Witness childhood and a father who has started smoking his own supply. His first customer changes everything in a heartbeat.

Cassidy Krug dives nine years for Frank, a coach who throws his aviators and screams until the vein in his forehead pops, all while swearing he...

"Stung" is a set of four live stories from June 2014 back in the feed, each about someone caught off guard.

Matt Kirshen, 18 and backpacking through France with two sisters from Berkeley, plans to sleep in a Bordeaux park until a priest and a local drug dealer both warn him off. The dealer's alternative invitation lands him somewhere stranger. Jen Kirkman dissects why she never wanted to take care of anyone, working through an elderly woman feeding her wheelchair-bound husband, a husband who fell in the shower while she stayed in bed, and a grandmother's wake full of...

This episode first surfaced back in June 2014, presenting three people who’d run out of road and somehow had to find more.

Daniel Lobell is broke enough to be applying for Medi-Cal, sitting in an LA social services office, and privately deciding his comedy career is finished, when an offhand habit turns the whole waiting room's attention on him. Joe Mulligan, a stand-up whose marriage and career have both come apart, flies to Boulder for a peyote ceremony and finds his spirit guide is the last thing he would have chosen. And Olga Schmutz, gutted by a br...

Three stories about laughing at exactly the wrong moment, and finding out it was the right one all along. Three ways of getting through it sideways.

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Three wildly different stories from a night RISK! recorded live in Boston back in May of 2014, pulled from the archive and dropped back into the feed.

(Content note: attempted suicide)

Josh Poirier grew up as the kid every bully found, singled out for years by an older boy named Paul. At his lowest, broke and checking himself into an inpatient psychiatric ward, the nurse who comes to wake him is the one person he spent his whole childhood running from.

Lillian DeVane lands the dream job: managing a plush...

At twenty-four, Allen Fetters is blindsided by the worst gallstone attack of his life. Too stubborn to call 911 or even a friend, he decides to drive himself to the ER, floors it down an empty road of green lights, on a collision course with a man on a bicycle crossing the intersection ahead of him.

Then Richard Velazquez rewinds to Christmas Eve, 1989, eighteen and riding shotgun in his mentor's prized 1964 Mercedes after a night of cocaine, rum, and reggaeton on repeat. On the snowy New Jersey Turnpike, with three other people in the car, he hears a...

Back from November 2021, this episode is just bonkers: original songs, sound collages, audio easter eggs, and other inanities stacked one on top of another.

We’ve got stamps.com jingles, a goth lament about needing a public toilet, TS Madison hollering about a good dick, a Cinderella scene that curdles into filth, and a thank-you number built entirely out of Kevin’s orgasm noises. Bits by and from Jeff Barr, Soce the Elemental Wizard, Brian Babylon, David Crabb, John LaSala, Detox, Alaska, and a stray Tom Brady sample wander through too.

For nearly an hour, RISK...

Two classic RISK! stories about walking into a room that codes you as wrong from the second you open your mouth.

Tara Clancy commuted from working-class Queens to a Manhattan college, where a classmate mocked how she said "huge" and a writing professor slipped her a bag of third-grade grammar workbooks.

Susan Kent moved to segregated Fitzgerald, Georgia at age six. By high school her closest friend Walt was Black, and when Jen played a Bobby Brown dedication for her from Walt over the local radio, Susan understood he was about to ask her to...

Kevin Allison sits down with Jeff Barr, RISK!'s longtime editor, for a farewell conversation almost two decades in the making. At its center is a story they've never told on the show: the mushroom trip Kevin took at Jeff's home in Colorado, when what began as a pleasant walk turned into hours of screaming panic, Kevin convinced he was dying and pacing with 911 half-dialed while Jeff pleaded with him not to call and phoned a nurse friend to talk him down.

Around that centerpiece, Kevin and Jeff cover Jeff's earliest audio experiments, the invention of the...

Back in May of 2014, RISK! hit Pittsburgh for the first time, and this classic episode brings the whole strange, sharp-edged night home.

(Content note: sexual assault)

As a counselor at a Pittsburgh women's clinic, Stacy Keene believes she's found her calling, until a frightened teenage patient and an openly hostile doctor put her in the middle of a confrontation she hadn’t expected.

Then Matt Bower answers a late-night Kmart call from a man who just needs one doorknob delivered to a dark house in the woods, and drives out to meet him.

Two New York men take the long way through heartbreak.

Brad Lawrence arrives in the city to become an actor while his girlfriend starts Columbia Law School, and their seven-year relationship goes cold almost on contact. Working two jobs and desperately lonely, he builds a nightly ritual of drinking far across town and riding the subway home drunk in the small hours, until one 3 a.m. ride lands him across the car from a woman he's sure he recognizes.

Christopher Moncayo-Torres cannot stop walking past his ex's Bushwick duplex after a broken engagement. When he...

An episode from May 2014 with more comedy than the alliterative title would suggest.

Dave Hill wanted to frighten himself on purpose, so he flew to northern Mexico to stay with an old college friend who had become the chaplain of a prison the cartels were running themselves. There is a pizza party, a borrowed guitar, and a man with a machete.

(Content note: suicidal ideation, suicide)

CJ Hostetter graduated into the 2009 economy, moved back in with their divorcing parents, and stopped feeling anything at all. Then a gunshot went off across the street.<...

Two comedians with two very different things to stop hiding, expose themselves in turn:

Calvin S. Cato is queer, twenty pounds lighter than he used to be, and willing to do almost anything to perform for more than three people and a sad disco ball. When a friend suggests the Naked Comedy Show, Calvin signs up on the strength of two words: "sells out." He does not ask a follow-up question. By the time he learns what "naked" actually means, he has already invited his entire art gallery.

Uriah Wesman moves to LA to be...

This one comes back from April of 2014, the second night of a RISK! live run in Reno, Nevada, and it swings hard between the filthy and the tender.

Josie Spadoni is working an afternoon at her Los Angeles dungeon when a client walks in with a request most people would refuse on the spot. She says yes.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Emily Reese grew up dreaming of a picket-fence Christian marriage and the submissive-wife role she thought came with it. When the money starts vanishing and her intuition won't quiet, she finally checks...

Let's dig into two people’s lives where physical desire set off completely unplanned-for chain reactions.

Ceara Lynch is a teenager when a stranger online suggests she bottle and sell her urine. She does it on a dare to herself, he pays $250, and what starts as a joke becomes a career in fetish work and verbal humiliation—one she has to hide from the people who raised her. (Shout out to The Mystery Box Show where this story was originally recorded!)

Then Baruch Porras-Hernandez gives a fake name at a San Francisco bathhouse and immediately regr...

Fox Emerson moves to Milan with his husband for a fresh start, then lets a charismatic man he met in Atlanta follow him there. The man settles into the apartment, grows colder and stranger by the day, and one late-night argument escalates until Fox is the one in handcuffs, alone in an Italian jail cell with no idea why.

Patrick Holbert convinces himself his marriage is quietly open, books an appointment with a dominatrix in Queens, and spends the next six weeks deciding whether to tell his wife. His confession lands nothing like he pictured. Funny, filthy...

Live from Reno in April 2014, three first-time RISK! storytellers turn a single night into a run of proposition, prophecy, and psychedelic reckoning.

Virginia Munsterman is a 20-year-old college student scraping by as a barista when a new job as a chiropractor's assistant lands her at a business conference in Clearwater, Florida. The company's multimillionaire CEO zeroes in on her immediately, and over two days his attention escalates from flattery and magic tricks to a yacht tour and a dinner where he asks her to give him the next 15 to 20 years of her life in exchange for his...

Kenice Mobley grew up on a 1999 movie fantasy of the woman who travels the world, says yes to everything, and never flinches. As an adult she follows that ideal into a Paris sex club, a single shared baguette, and a straight-faced argument about whether taking your clothes off makes anyone free. It’s all fun and game right up until it turns into a question about who a room actually wants.

(Content note: suicide)

Richard Velazquez is fifteen in 1986, newly out of a Jehovah's Witness childhood, and living with his drug-dealing father, wh...

From April 2014, five people finding a way out.

Sean Crespo signs up for a sleep deprivation study to escape the worst summer job in Boston, then spends ten days plotting one act of privacy. Kate Greathead, dumped and displaced, discovers she can cry on the subway every night and nobody will stop her.

(Content note: suicidal ideation)

Jeff Simmermon loses a testicle to cancer and gains an imaginary black bird that whispers to him at night about how the loneliness will never end. John F. O'Donnell, in the middle of a manic episode...

Two people confront what it means to stay bound to someone who keeps letting them down.

Tuesday Thomas, a trans woman in LA with a lifelong pull toward unavailable men, meets a charming match on a dating app. The chemistry is undeniable, right up until he looks her in the eye and warns her not to Google him. Her response becomes a very funny, surprisingly pointed argument about honesty and what commitment is really worth.

Then David Hu comes home to the Bronx for Father's Day 2021 and finds his father, deep in dementia, suddenly and...

Marilyn Gilchrist is a professional dog trainer, and "Who Am I Now" is her conversation with Michael Shikashio, lifted from his podcast The Bitey End of the Dog. Kevin Allison sets it up and returns at the end with his own thoughts. This is a companion episode to Still Dog People: Two Truths, released earlier in the week.

(Content note: graphic dog attack)

An hour into a routine welfare check on a foster dog, Marilyn stood up to leave. The dog grabbed the lead, she dropped it exactly as she had twice already that afternoon...

For the first of two Still Dog People episodes this week, John LaSala guest-hosts with his wife Kate LaSala, a professional dog behavior consultant.

(Content note: graphic dog attack on a child)

Jill Karliner watched her four-year-old twin sons head into the neighbors' backyard to play with the big kids. Minutes later, she heard a scream that changed how her family would live with dogs. In the years since, she has come to hold two truths that don't quite fit together.

Kate joins John afterward for a wide-ranging discussion, drawing on her work...

A classic RISK! episode from March 2014. Three live storytellers, three very different voices in the head.

Vicki Tollemache spent her teens as the careful kid orbiting a wilder crowd. The summer before she turns 16, she decides to get her first kiss over with and arranges a late-night meeting with a boy she barely knows. The kiss becomes something she spends years trying to forget, for reasons she only understands much later.

Kevin Allison hits the bottom of a lost decade with no career, no money, and no plan. He picks up a book about taking...

Kevin launches a new classic RISK! series for Disability Pride Month, revisiting stories about life with a disability from episodes past.

Amy Salloway takes a job as guest playwright at Entropy, a theater program for adults with multiple disabilities. On her first day, a charming client named Aaron falls at her feet. The interview quickly becomes something Amy knows is off-limits.

Mary Gossett meets Andrew on the Plenty of Fish dating app. He's a wheelchair user. Their first months together are equal parts giddy first love and daily logistical negotiation. Then, on the morning of...

Two people learn something about protecting and being protected, one at a mall in lockdown, one on a plane full of strangers.

(Content note: gun violence)

Jon Rappoport is on a Zoom call in his home office when his wife bursts in with news that their twelve-year-old twin daughters are texting from a nearby mall about an active shooter and hiding in Macy's. He drives there in flip-flops, half feral, and the girls keep texting him back, begging him not to come.

Then Robin Gelfenbien takes a small plane out of St. Louis...

This classic RISK! episode first aired in March 2014, and the four San Diego storytellers behind it cover a remarkable range, from white-knuckle confession to gleeful filth.

Tommy Galan traces a drinking habit that began at age eleven and nearly cost him his family, until three little words from a bar owner reframe everything. Justin Hudnall grows up on the motto "you don't miss what you don't have," then goes looking for the Vietnam-veteran father he never met.

(Content note: suicide, sexual abuse, eating disorder)

Meanwhile, Joy Keller lands in Los Angeles broke and...