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

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, freshly heartbroken and dreading her return to New York. She circulates a notebook around fifty strangers with an invitation to write a story together, then sets her sights on convincing a flight attendant named Valentino to let her read it aloud before they land. Leave your comments and find full episode details plus music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/out-of-my-hands  Be Part of RISK!

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 answers an ad promising pay to meditate, which pulls her toward a guru selling enlightenment by the thousands. And Lesley borrows a coworker's copy of the film Secretary and recognizes a desire she has hidden since childhood. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-san-diego-cre522  Be Part of RISK!

Radio producer Jon Nelson curates and guest-hosts an episode built from three listener submissions RISK! never quite knew where to file, all circling childhood faith and the certainties grown-ups pass down. Jana Fisher is eleven and the most devout girl in her friend group until a sleepover becomes a contest over who is truly saved. Jesse Bradley-Amore is twelve and watching cartoons when his mother appears with a police nightstick and a frank approach to sex ed. Stephen Harder, fresh out of Bible college, arrives for a youth ministry interview at a megachurch and learns the being who scheduled it may not work there. Nelson, an avowed agnostic, threads it together with his own reckoning with faith and his late father. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/i-dont-know  Be Part of RISK!

Back in March 2014, RISK! tripled down on a single subject, and this classic episode was the result. Josh Healey is 17 and smitten with his drama club co-president when she casts him, a boy, in the first ever co-ed production of The Vagina Monologues. The soccer team has questions, the college feminists have objections, and the cast is heading toward open revolt. Amy Salloway, fresh off a massage therapist's humiliating refusal to touch her, lands at a size acceptance conference in Seattle. It turns out she's one of the only straight women in the building and starts to wonder if that's negotiable for a weekend. And Elna Baker arrives in Hollywood for the pitch meeting of her dreams while her own body quietly sabotages the room. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/vagina-vagina-vagina-cre521  Be Part of RISK!

Two people who look fine on the outside, and the very different storms going on underneath. Ande Jackson is years into rebuilding after ovarian cancer. But one afternoon mid-treatment, immune system flattened by chemo, she decides to open her door to a neighbor holding a casserole. The woman means well, and reaches for a thought about mortality that does the opposite of comfort." (Content note: heavy drug use) Chetter M. Galloway is in deep with crystal meth in 2005, dodging help from his HIV doctor and dragging his family through the collateral damage. His years-long cycle of relapse only screeches to a halt when an unspeakable revelation about his dealer drops a bomb on his life and leaves Chetter praying a stash of compromising photos doesn't drag him down with it. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/but-you-look-so-good  Be Part of RISK!

Long shots don't always pan out the way you hoped. Sometimes they catch fire. Sometimes they mug you. Shauna McGarry, a TV writer who can't shake her mother's thrift-store instincts, talks herself into a $2,500 used hot tub from a shady Craigslist dealer named Dan. Things don’t turn out so great. David Crabb waitered through the days after 9/11 at one of the only open restaurants in lower Manhattan, listening to strangers unburden themselves over candlelight. By the end of the week he'd saved $900 for a U-Haul, and on the walk home from his last shift, drunk and carrying a magnum of wine, he felt an arm clamp around his neck and something jab into his ribs. Leave your reactions and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-long-shot-stories-1  You can find all of our special series episodes at risk-show.com/specialseries  Be Part of RISK!

Brittany Ross and Sam Feirstein are both hungry for it in this episode: the moment someone finally looks your way and says, yes, you. For Brittany, that moment arrives in the least expected form. She is in her early 20s, grinding through acting classes and princess gigs and bar shifts, desperate for anyone in Los Angeles to see her as the star she knows she could be. When a neighbor with an apparent break from reality begins accusing Brittany of following her through the apartment building, Brittany finds herself oddly reluctant to shut it down. The woman is unhinged, possibly dangerous, and giving Brittany more attention than anyone in Hollywood has managed in years. Sam's wound runs deeper. His story begins at a dressing room in a North Hollywood strip mall in 1976, where a single word from his mother sets off a decade of relentless bullying. By the time he lands at a commercial casting in the 1990s, surrounded by quarterbacks and cheerleaders, the kid who won a writing contest nobody noticed is just tryi