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RISK!

If you like The Moth, This American Life or Snap Judgment, take a walk on the wilder side with RISK! Your colorful host Kevin Allison (of the legendary comedy group The State) helms this surprisingly uncensored show where people tell jaw-dropping true stories they never thought they'd dare to share in public. RISK! is hilarious, heart-wrenching and remarkably real. Think you've heard it all? Fasten your seatbelt.

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on September 8th, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mixed Feelings

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-show.com/disabilitystories 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Best of Disability Stories

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Out of My Hands

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in New York City on September 8th, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live From San Diego!

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on September 8, 2026, in New York City

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I Don't Know

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on September 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vagina Vagina Vagina!

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But You Look So Good

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!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on September 8, 2026, in New York City

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Best of Long Shot Stories

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 trying to get one person to see him as something other than a problem.

Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/negative-attention 

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ on Tuesday, September 8, 2026 in NYC!

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Negative Attention

This one originally aired in August 2013, and the fathers in it tend toward the unexpectedly generous. And heck, this episode may as well be part of our Fathers Day Stories series!

Chesley Calloway grew up in Baton Rouge largely without his dad, a Gulf Coast redneck-hippie who was always in the woods. At 15, a familiar smell triggers a memory and opens an unlikely conversation that changes everything between them. The détente holds until college, ideology, and vegetarianism pull them apart again.

Gretchen Menter-Felice's father ran a funeral home out of the family garage, and she grew up sitting in the corner of his embalming room in a yellow chair while he worked. By her 20s, his cancer diagnosis and a new girlfriend had made him feel far away. She finds a way back.

(Content note: death of a parent)

Colleen Hindsley's father was a classically trained baritone who owned an Irish pub and could work any name into a song. He raised a household that was always singing. When lung cancer took his voice, it silenced the whole family.

(00:00:34) In September 2024, RISK! shared a story by Robin Gelfenbien all about Colleen Hidsley, who has since passed away, in an episode called What A Vision: risk-show.com/podcast/what-a-vision 

And Dan Kennedy is 16, upside down in a totaled car on a residential street in rural Northern California, sitting at a stranger's piano and dreading his father's arrival. His dad turns out to be someone different than he expected.

Comment on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/my-old-man-cre446

Be Part of RISK!

🎟 See RISK! live⁠ in NYC on Tuesday, September 8, 2026

✍️ Pitch your story⁠

❤️ Support us on Patreon⁠

💵 Make a one-time donation⁠⁠ via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com

📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book⁠

🎓 Take storytelling classes with us⁠

🎥 Hire Kevin as a coach or get personalized videos
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My Old Man

Ts Madison, Christopher Ryan, Aaron Kheifets and Ceara Lynch share stories of deviating from the norm.
Support RISK! on Patreon at Patreon.com/RISK
Make a one-time donation to RISK! at PayPal.me/RISKshow
Get tickets to RISK! live shows at RISK-show.com/tour
Get the RISK! book at TheRISKBook.com
Take our storytelling classes at TheStoryStudio.org
Hire Kevin Allison to make a personalized video at Cameo.com/TheKevinAllison
Hire Kevin Allison as a coach at KevinAllison.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deviance

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