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 

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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

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Kambri and Evan arrive on the same episode from opposite ends of the spectrum, which turns out to be exactly right.

Kambri Crews grew up poor in rural Texas with a deaf family, spending her adolescence riding horses to the corner store, smoking cigarettes, and managing a fireworks stand at age 13. When she finally gets her own horse, he goes mysteriously missing one afternoon, circling the property in a daze. Her brother tears off barefoot into the woods and comes back with an explanation.

(Content note: domestic violence)

Evan Miles drives home after a 12-hour hospital shift to find a police helicopter overhead and four cruisers closing in. Charged with attempted murder, he spends nine days in L.A.'s Twin Towers jail before learning what his partner of nine years told them.

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

And thanks to Julia Wiedeman's Top Shelf Stories show in New York, where Kambri’s story was told. Catch the next one on June 18th, 2026!

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In San Francisco, 2014, four great storytellers took the RISK! stage at SF Sketch Fest:

Stephen Tobolowsky was directing the New York premiere of The Miss Firecracker Contest with Holly Hunter in the lead and a stalker with a ticket for opening night. The question of whether to go on becomes a different question entirely when Holly disappears into the basement holding what looks like a butcher knife.

Dana Gould spent years as pen pal and friend to Maila Nurmi, the actress who invented Vampira, destitute and barely known, living in a converted garage. He reads from the last letter he wrote her.

(Content note: child sexual abuse)

Nato Green landed a yard-work job at 16, took about fifteen years to figure out what his employer actually wanted, and has some thoughts on what actually protects kids.

Brendon Walsh got his hat ruined, his face rearranged, his brass knuckles confiscated, and his name put on a court docket, in that order.

Leave your comments on these stories and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-san-fran-2014-cre520 

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Two stories from people who found themselves in situations they didn't choose and had to figure out what to do from inside them. Guest-hosted by the captivating Cyndi Freeman.

(Content note: references to torture)

Sofia Javed is a Pakistani-American interpreter hired to work in Uzbek and Russian at Guantanamo Bay, where she is ordered not to sympathize with detainees and then immediately put to the test. What starts as a potential crisis in a cellblock turns on a single, surprisingly mundane demand.

(Content note: physical abuse, domestic violence)

Heather Minter grew up in an evangelical fundamentalist family that uprooted itself for the mission field in Papua New Guinea, leaving her and her brother in a boarding school dorm run by a cruel and volatile house father. The faith that held her together through childhood eventually came apart in college, and what filled the void turned out to be its own kind of trap.

Leave your reactions and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/captives 

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One chilly Seattle night in February 2014, four storytellers on the RISK! stage said some things they probably wouldn’t have otherwise said out loud.

Dan Savage told the story of his early days writing Savage Love in Seattle, doing drag to hide his identity, and one late-night encounter that left him genuinely bewildered by his own desire.

(Content note: murder, sexual assault)

Kelleen Conway Blanchard grew up carrying fragments of a story no child should know: her cousin Pam was murdered in her apartment, and the man everyone suspected walked free. Twenty years later, a phone call changed what Kelleen knew, though not necessarily how it felt.

Summer Waldron was freshly divorced, newly medicated for depression, and committed to a long-planned threesome. Then the night itself unraveled, pulled apart by side effects, a panicked call from her mother, and a body that had simply stopped cooperating.

Emmett Montgomery nearly died of hypothermia on a high school survival trip in the Utah desert, hallucinating through every bad decision on the way there.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/live-from-seattle-cre518 

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It's summer 2014, and Bailey Swilley has a boyfriend she's been trying to leave for months and a father who is about to make that the least of her problems. When her dad goes into cardiac arrest, the family descends on his hospital room in Memphis, and her Taiwanese grandmother, who has never previously mentioned being a healer, begins issuing instructions from a witch she met on a Carnival cruise. The spells escalate. So does everything else.

Nick Hornedo has been falling for his girl best friends since he was a teenager, and he knows it's a problem. In high school, a girl named Chloe pulls him into corners to talk, says things that sound like promises, and kicks him in the groin. He keeps finding reasons to stay in the game. It does not go the way he imagined.

Between the two stories, JC Cassis drops in with a deathbed anecdote about a grandfather who wanted everyone to know they should be working harder.

Share your reactions and find music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/love-death-and-dads-pee 

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This one goes deep. "Into the Mystic" first aired in February 2014, and it brings together three accounts of the uncanny from three storytellers who had no map for what they were experiencing.

Christine Lee, an Episcopal priest, has spent years navigating the gap between the faith she teaches and the faith she actually feels. When a parishioner with a seriously injured knee agrees to be prayed over, Christine finds herself in the stairwell of her church, watching something she cannot explain.

(Content note: emotional abuse, child psychological abuse)

Lulu grew up in 1970s Pittsburgh with a mother who was cruel and checked out. That summer, a neighbor's adult son with schizophrenia becomes her unlikely companion and proceeds to fill her head with detailed, terrifying visions of the Rapture, the Antichrist, and the Tribulation.

Jen Kwok is with her then-fiancé's family on Staten Island when his father collapses from a heart attack on Christmas Eve. The days that follow are brutal, and something extraordinary happens on the bus ride back to the city.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/into-the-mystic-cre517 

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Guest-host Taj Easton is in the chair this week, presenting these two stories on the long shadow of patriarchy with a particular attentiveness, repeatedly asking the same leading question: Are straight men okay?

Cassidy Krug arrives at Stanford a diver of moderate ambition, then spends nine years being screamed at by a coach whose legendarily ruthless style drives her to the Olympics. Fifteen years after retiring, she still isn't sure whether what got her there was abuse, or maybe exactly what she needed.

(Content note: domestic violence)

Thomas Brazzle grows up desperate for his ex-Marine father's approval, but the man abandons his family after Thomas intervenes on his mother's behalf during a vicious assault by his father. Thirty years later, at his mother's funeral, his father reappears, and Thomas is stunned to find he's still desperate for the approval of a man who brutalized his mother, abandoned them all, and is now a stranger to him.

Leave your reactions and find episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/brutal-authority 

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This one goes back to February 2014: a live RISK! episode built around the theme of fascination, meaning the things that get under your skin and won't let go.

Ryan Britt was a self-appointed porn expert at age 10, thanks to his father's very open magazine policy and to a darkroom box labeled "Do Not Open" that turned out to contain something far more interesting than photographic paper.

Adam Wade spent years nursing a Rick Moranis complex, right up until a chance encounter at a pharmaceutical convention gave him an unusual opportunity to put it to use.

(Content note: eating disorder)

Brad Lawrence was 15, overweight, and utterly transfixed by a softcore film called Felicity — until a different movie sent him down a dangerous path of self-reinvention over a single summer.

Lulu left a long, sexless marriage at 44 and spent the next several years making up for lost time, culminating in a nerve-racking attempt to fulfill a very specific fantasy at a kink convention class in Astoria.

Full episode details and music credits at risk-show.com/podcast/fascination-cre516 

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