Risk!

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 police matter, one can argue and the other cannot afford to speak. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell and Capital Storytelling in Sacramento, where both were first performed. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/immigrant-stories-4  You can find all of our Immigrant Stories episodes at risk-show.com/immigrantstories  Be Part of RISK!

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 welfare check on a man no one has seen in three weeks, with dark brown liquid dripping into the apartment below. Scott Whitehair spends months engineering the perfect fifth-grade Halloween: Freddy Krueger, down to the twenty-dollar glove and the Burn Victim makeup kit, with the school janitor’s bathroom chosen as the transformation site. And thanks to This Much Is True in Chicago, where Scott first performed this live. Leave a com

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 leaving it. The man has sunken cheeks and a smirk, and behind him a treeline Aaron thinks he recognizes from his own front porch. (Content note: child neglect, emotional abuse) Ash wakes at fifteen to thick brown smoke hanging silent in her bedroom, and crawls down the hall toward the heat to find her mother’s bed consuming itself in flames.  This episode features music by the wonderful Allysen Callery! Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/scary-stories-18-

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 the pool instructor sets her up on a drive-in date with a fellow patient. You can leave comments and find episode details at risk-show.com/podcast/make-it-stop-cre541  Be Part of RISK!

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, checks Grindr, and winds up signing a consent form in a stranger’s hotel room. Three residents of a city where the most ordinary afternoon of the week can turn on you fast. Thanks to the Bangkok Stories Show and workshops, both regularly held at The Garage Burger and Grill in Thong Lo, where all three of these stories were shared. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/bangkok-stories-1  Be Part of RISK!

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 defiant as her response to everything else. And Radcliffe Royds falls from a fully loaded Audi Quattro to a Soho builder's skip in the space of a fortnight. And thanks to Spark London for co-producing the show that brought us across the Atlantic for the first time. Leave comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-london-1-cre540  Be Part of RISK!

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 grade in Marina, California, able to count to ten and ask for orange juice, and little else. Then story time runs long and she really needs the bathroom. And thanks to Lisa Cantrell & Capital Storytelling, who produced the Sacramento live show where Ximena first told this one! Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-hispanic-lives-5  You can find all of our Hispanic Lives episodes at risk-s

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: child sexual abuse, incestuous family dynamics) LeCount Holmes was eleven when his father promised to introduce him one day to a grown woman who could teach him how to make love. At sixteen, his father came to collect him from school. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/the-best-of-risk-37 You can find all of our Best of RISK! episodes at risk-show.com/bestofrisk  Be Part of RISK!

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 himself go. (Content note: attempted abduction) Cathy Smith drops acid, sticks out her thumb across early-1970s Pittsburgh, and climbs into a windowless van that turned around a little too eagerly to pick her up. Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/seedy-cre537  Be Part of RISK!

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, agrees to sneak into a mall movie theater, then hears a janitor's voice on the staircase and leaves everyone behind. And thanks to Frank Traynor’s It's Funny Now, the show where he and Kona Morris both told their stories from this episode. Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/gettin-off-scot-free  Be Part of RISK!

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 auditorium has other plans, and his salvation may hinge on a Socrates Café at Whole Foods. (Content note: child sexual abuse) Ray Christian grows up in Richmond's Churchill neighborhood and finds an unlikely community among older boys who raise pigeons across the river in Fulton. Their ringleader brags openly about sexual assaults he's committed, and one afternoon Ray is invited fishing. Leave your comments to these stories plus find episode

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 can put her on an Olympic team. She still wonders whether it was abuse or the only road to greatness. (Content note: sexual assault, homicide, suicidal ideation) Annie Carnrike and her cousin Michael are close as siblings, and when Annie comes out as trans, he is the one who loves her with no "but." Then one drunken Thanksgiving night, Michael breaks down her door, and Annie fights for her life. Support Annie in overcoming her ongoing struggles with the justice system and in her campa

"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 relatives she could never picture creating herself. Eli Olsberg signs up for a blood drive offering two free movie tickets and ends up with three nurses semicircled around him. Janine Brito, raised religious by her Cuban father, is four days into her freshman year of college when a voicemail changes everything. Leave your comments plus find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/stung-cre534  Be Part of RISK!

Three people come within reach of what they want and are nearly undone grabbing for it. Karen Ibarra brings a self-described nerd's devotion to a heated Los Angeles delegate election, where bad blood between two party factions turns personal. David Zellnik spends his childhood worshipping the stage, then auditions for the bad-boy role he wants most in his high school's production of Oliver!, only for the director to pull him aside with a wounding notion about which part he should play. And thanks to EST's "Truth Be Told", the New York show and podcast where this story first appeared. Amy Sohn hits bottom and pins everything on an elderly Manhattan analyst for one ridiculous reason, a rumor that he is Woody Allen's therapist, then sinks into his Freudian world without admitting why she came. Leave your thoughts on the stories, and find details and music credits, at risk-show.com/podcast/almost  Be Part of RISK!

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 breakup, walks into a Philadelphia shop at 3 a.m. and walks out with a strap-on named Carlitos and a brand-new sense of purpose. Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/second-wind-cre533  Be Part of RISK!

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. Be Part of 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!