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
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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 body.
(Content note: sexual harassment by a classmate)
Christine Gentry is 13, the smallest kid on her school bus, and she has just found a thrift store shirt that makes her feel pretty.
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/humiliating-cre543
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🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8, 2026
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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, infertile, and holding frozen embryos when she decided to run her own surrogacy search instead of paying an agency. She opened phone calls with strangers by asking about their vaginas, and the one woman who felt like destiny started turning up in her fantasies.
In case you're wondering about the stranger behind the music that closes the episode, it's Wondering Stranger!
Leave your comments on the stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/nontraditional
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🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8, 2026
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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 ideation)
Jen Bosworth-Ramirez comes home to Evanston for Christmas, to a mother leaving her father and a father in a sleeping bag he believes makes him invisible. Shannon Cason, six years celibate, spends one night with the church secretary and is called to the front of the sanctuary.
Leave your comments and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-chicago-2-cre542
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🎟 See RISK! live in New York City, Tuesday, December 8, 2026
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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
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🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 8
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💵 Make a one-time donation via PayPal or Zelle to kevin@risk-show.com
📚 Shop merch or the RISK! book
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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 comment and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/scary-stories-4-yikes-cre505
Be Part of RISK!
🎟 See RISK! live in New York City on December 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
This podcast, its content and its artwork are not owned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Castquire.
