Risk!

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 vintage store with her three closest friends. The catch is the owner, a wealthy heiress whose generosity comes wrapped in cruelty, and whose promise to sign the store over to Lillian sits just out of reach. Will Luera adored a father who kept disappearing for years at a stretch. The reasons turn out to run through prison, cocaine, and a charming, determined man who keeps rebuilding the exact life that took him away,, and Will can feel it all starting again. Leave your comments on these stories and fi

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 whooshing sound and a  tremendous bang. Thanks to So Say We All in San Diego, whose live show is where Richard first brought this story to an audience. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/no-harm-no-foul  Be Part of RISK!

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! sets the stories aside and just plays. Leave your reactions and find the exhaustive list of credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-inanity-cre1304  Be Part of 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 prom. Fitzgerald had two proms: a whites-only one and a Black one. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-school-stories-2  And you can find all of our School Stories episodes at risk-show.com/schoolstories  Be Part of RISK!

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 RISK! poo flags, the scat play scene that broke Jeff for a while, and the fan email that led Jeff to an ADHD diagnosis decades into adulthood. Peppered throughout is a highlight reel of the audio silliness Jeff has made over the years. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-jeffisode You can find all of our conversation story episodes at risk-show.com/conversationstories Be Part of RISK!

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. (Content note: child sexual abuse) And Jordan Sargent spends a summer under the spell of a friend's churchgoing father, until the man's stepdaughter’s accusation sends Jordan reaching for a jar of coins and a plan he can barely admit to. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-pittsburgh-cre530 Be Part of RISK!

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 finds a stranger's wallet holding four hundred dollars, returning it becomes a project, and the restaurant where the owner works becomes the setting for a fresh-start fantasy that a pushy stranger at the bar keeps complicating. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/is-it-her  Be Part of RISK!

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. Tyler Phillips took a pizza order from a caller who volunteered his full name and street address. The street turned out to be real. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/death-defying-cre529  Be Part of RISK!

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 a one-liner comedian and bottoms out performing in the back of an ice cream shop, where his jokes are so bad they ruin the ice cream. A comedy club GM asks him one simple question about himself, and Uriah casually mentions his parents were in a doomsday cult. Then corrects himself: three cults. Then mentions the kidnapping. Then the sword. Uriah spent years hiding behind a character on stage because if the audience rejected the character, it wouldn't hurt. Putting the real childhood on stage is t

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 the family bank account herself. We lost Emily not long ago, and we're so glad her voice lives on here. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-reno-2-cre528  Be Part of RISK!

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 regrets it when the man he meets turns out to be the romantic partner he's spent years searching for. The lie compounds through months of dates, a surprise birthday party, and a run-in with his own mother. (And thanks to Dixie De La Tour who co-produced the RISK/Bawdy Storytelling crossover show this story was originally told at!) Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-sex-stories-5  You can find all of o

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, and more honest about marriage than he probably planned. Both men skipped the conversation that might have changed everything. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.Be Part of RISK!

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 fortune. Jessica Levity is driving cross-country to Reno with her brother when a detour to the clearest lake in Kansas turns into a three-day stay with a self-proclaimed shaman named Lone Wolf. He shows up at their campsite with a bottle of ketchup Jessica had forgotten to buy, claiming the Great Spirit told him to bring it, and offers to reveal the hidden history of the Earth. His teachings turn out to include an antisemitic alien-h

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, when he walks onto a Lower East Side corner for his first crack sale. What he is really carrying is fear: of demons, of prison, of turning into the man in front of him. When his first customer hits the pipe and collapses, every childhood terror comes back at once. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/trying-it-on  Be Part of RISK!

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 in 2008, decides he alone can stop the neoconservatives from crashing the internet. Jean Ann Le Bec, married in 1966 to a man who naps all day, goes back to college on Open Admissions and finds a women's group, a room worth occupying, and Mona. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/freedom-cre525 Be Part of RISK!

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 frighteningly ill. Amid COVID lockdowns and an overwhelmed nursing home, he and his mother face impossible choices about how to care for a man who is slipping away. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/let-him-go  Be Part of RISK!

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, and every muscle in the dog went tense. The weeks after taught her that the wound in her leg was the smaller problem. She had built a career and a self on being good with dogs, and now she could not be in a room with one she did not know. Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/still-dog-people-who-am-i-now  You can find all of our Conversation Stories at risk-show.com/conversationstories  Be Part of RISK!

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 in fear and aggression cases and her role as a companion animal end-of-life doula. Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/still-dog-people-two-truths  Be Part of RISK!

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 dictation from God and starts a notebook of his own, never sure whether the answers are wisdom or just his own voice talking back. Mollena Williams admits she's an alcoholic and lands in detox, where a four-foot hyena climbs out of the floor and refuses to leave. Leave your comments and find music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/mixed-feelings-cre523  Be Part of RISK!

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 what was supposed to be a landmark day, Mary loses feeling on the right side of her body. (And thanks to Amy Salloway and Jeff Grell, who organized the Twin Cities RISK! fundraiser where Mary's story was originally recorded.) • Leave your comments to these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-disability-stories • Find this and future Best of Disability Stories episodes at risk-s