From Hiding in the Closet to Front Row Center: How a Camera Broke a Lifetime of Shyness | Optimal Conversations, Episode 6

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on episode 6 of the Optimal Conversations podcast with host Mary Wong of Optimal Coaching Australia, recorded December 29, 2023, lightly edited for readability. Mary had earlier been Richard’s guest on his Author Talks series; this episode is the reciprocal conversation. Richard returned to the show in 2026 for episode 55, on AI and The Death of Thinking.

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books under his own name and ghostwritten over 54 more for clients. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s.

Two thousand computers and a man who couldn’t accept an award

Mary Wong: You told me you were in charge of IT at Trader Joe’s.

Richard Lowe: For 20 years I was director of technical services and computer operations: almost 2,000 computer systems, eight staff, and around 20 consultants at a time. Warehouse computers, central computers, the disaster recovery site, the cybersecurity, laptops, desktops; you name it, I probably managed it, on call 24 by 7, Christmas Day included.

Mary Wong: And back then you weren’t comfortable talking to people.

Richard Lowe: Throughout my life I was very shy. Getting on this podcast would have been impossible: it’s people, oh my God. If they worked for me, or it was business, I could switch that on. But socially, I couldn’t do it. I won a couple of major awards and couldn’t get up on stage to accept them. And here’s the distinction that matters: shy and introverted are two different states. Introversion means being around people drains you and solitude recharges you; extroverts are the reverse. Shyness means you can’t talk to people at all. You can be either without the other; I was both. Today I’m still an introvert, still pretty much a loner, and not shy at all. I’ll happily walk up to a gang member wearing a gun and ask him about his tattoos.

Mary Wong: And his tattoos matter to him, so you’ve opened with something important to him.

Richard Lowe: Exactly, and here’s a note for the men watching: skip the pickup lines. Ask about the tattoos, ask about the jewelry. That must have hurt. What does it mean? Why that one? People have a story behind every tattoo, and in 99 percent of cases they’ll open right up, because you noticed something they care about.

Where the shyness came from

Richard Lowe: It started in childhood. My parents argued constantly, with each other, and with me if I opened my mouth, so I learned to hide in the closet or under the desk and make myself as small as I could. Life reinforced it from there: beaten up by bullies in school, then a marriage where my wife was very sick and my whole world narrowed to caring for her and working. When she passed away, seventeen years ago now, from the side effects of smoking, I caved in completely.

And I made a decision about grief. My mother lost her first daughter at nine months old, and she carried that grief her entire life, seventy years of it, to her own death. For me, that’s not where I wanted to be. I knew I had to experience the grief, and I refused to let it take over my life. So three days after the funeral I drove to Joshua Tree, climbed the little path up the back of Skull Rock, about three stories of boulder, and sat on top for eight hours. Wear sunscreen if you try this; Miss Lily Whiteskin here turned bright red. And I asked: what do I want to do with my life now? One answer came back clearly: break the shyness. Break the pattern.

Marjani, and front row center

Richard Lowe: I picked up a camera, partly against the grief, and photographed national parks, state parks, museums. Then the local Renaissance faire, where the faire folk, who are like circus people, a real community, took me in as their adopted person and eventually one of their official photographers, alongside a couple of others, including a man named Gar who took much better pictures than me. And then one weekend at the Irwindale faire I sat down in the back row of the belly dance stage, where a conservatively dressed Middle Eastern-style troupe called Ujam performed, and I photographed weekend after weekend, ten thousand pictures a weekend, posting them free on the internet, always from the back row with a telephoto lens, totally caved in, within a year of my wife passing.

And one day the troupe’s leader, Marjani, one of my dearest friends today, walked toward me. Tattoos down both arms, which she had done herself, on her own arms, demons and gargoyles, piercings; tattoos were completely foreign to me then, and she scared the hell out of me. I’m sitting there going oh my God, oh my God. She put her arms around me, which was worse, and said: thank you for taking all the photos, thank you for giving them away free. We’d like to invite you to sit front row center; it will be reserved for you from now on. And I’m going to get you into every show that I can.

That was the breakthrough, and here’s how bad the shyness was: the breakthrough was discovering I didn’t die from talking to somebody. No bad effects. Life didn’t go to hell. A whole bunch of stuff just disappeared, and I became the belly dance photographer of Southern California: troupes bought my tickets and asked me to their shows, and even tolerated my flash, which dancers hate, because I was their photographer and their friend. After 1,200 belly dance shoots and 300 Renaissance faires, plus WWE matches, World War II and Civil War reenactments, and hundreds of photo shoots, using the camera to talk to people the whole way, one day I woke up and the shyness was gone. One day shy, one day not. Literally night and day.

By the end I was the guy who’d spot a man and a woman walking separately at a faire and say: you two know each other? No? Good, get together, I’ll take a couple’s photo. Arms around each other; before long they’re kissing on camera, strangers, and of course then they want the pictures. Two couples actually got married because of me. And one couple got divorced because of me, when the pictures hit the internet and it turned out they were both married, but not to each other. That wasn’t part of the plan.

Gangland etiquette and the year-long tattoo test

Richard Lowe: I lived in gangland Hollywood in those years, which is where the gang member example comes from: I really did walk up to gang members and ask about their tattoos. A middle-class white person in gangland isn’t going to be touched unless he does something stupid, because that brings the cops; I was genuinely respectful, and they were fine with it, probably humoring me. I learned exactly one lesson the hard way: never look at a gang leader’s girlfriend without permission. I glanced, because she had impressive tattoos, and he went off: don’t look at my woman. I backed away, said no disrespect intended, I’m very sorry, I just liked her tattoos, and talked my way out. In that culture, at that time, she was effectively his possession, and you respect the culture you’re standing in, whether it’s yours or not.

My own tattoos came later, and my artist, Renny Zulu, one of the best in the world, in all the tattoo magazines, a man I photographed often because he also sponsored dance shows, made me wait a year. He said: you’re not a person who gets tattoos, so if you still want them in a year, I’ll do them. I still wanted them. I brought my dear friend Mardavi Sakuntala, a Bharatanatyam dancer, whose assigned job was to laugh every time I screamed, to lighten the mood; she had a great time. Eight hours in one sitting, which I don’t recommend: a color tattoo means shading, the same spot again and again, maybe four or five hundred thousand needle pricks under the skin, and around the twentieth pass you want to rip your arm off with your teeth. The phoenix is rebirth from ashes: my marriage, my wife’s death, my restart. The dragon is me: peaceful, intelligent, charming creatures that go out of their way to help, and don’t piss them off. The coral snake, the most venomous and the shyest, painted with a gap in its coil, because my artist told me the mythology: close the circle and your soul can’t get out of your body. And the black widow: leave her corner alone and she’ll leave you alone.

The gilded cage, the stalkers, and the echo chambers

Richard Lowe: The camera took me places I’d never have gone: lunch with supermodels, friendships with the belly dance superstars you saw on the TV dance shows, Sabrina Fox among them, the Labyrinth of Jareth masquerade in Hollywood, the biggest masquerade ball in the country, four years running, photographing $10,000 costumes and a robot rig twenty feet tall, and San Diego Comic Con four years, 200,000 people in a venue meant for half that. All while working the day job: a typical week was work Monday, belly dance show Monday night, shows Wednesday, drive to the Northern California faire Friday, back Sunday night, and the next weekend fly to the Ohio faire, or the New York one. No space to wallow: busy, happy, exhausted. Including the famous Fresno weekend: three models in Renaissance dress lined up for a day of shooting, and an emergency call from the computer systems 150 miles away, so I photographed the models with the phone against my ear while walking my consultant through the recovery. He pulled off a miracle; the models were mildly annoyed; such is life. And this was the Blackberry era; none of today’s remote access existed.

We got to talking about fame, and filters, and cages. One of my ghostwriting clients is a rock star, platinum-plus, hundreds of thousands of records, and he has no filter at all: whatever is in his brain is in the world. But most celebrities live in a gilded cage: Madonna behind guards and fences has no idea what we little people are living, and that’s why celebrities make poor role models and worse spokespeople on vaccines or politics; they don’t live in the real world and can’t. It’s not hypothetical to me: one of the owners connected with Trader Joe’s was kidnapped years ago, an ear cut off and sent home as proof of life, and he was never the same, guarded ever after. If I won the lottery, my first stop would be the best security company I could find. And fame draws stalkers: famous dancers asked me to photograph evidence of their stalkers, and one told me about the stalker she’d finally gotten a restraining order against, and then she looked up over her house and her name was written in the sky. He’d hired a skywriter. Her first thought: how did he know where I live?

The cage feeds the deeper problem: echo chambers. They started with advertising: the platforms learn what you want to see, feed you more of it, and pretty soon your whole feed agrees with you and you think the whole world is donkeys. The papers I’ve been reading say it plainly: echo chambers are tearing at the threads of society, from the political vitriol to the flat earthers. There’s a TED talk by a Black man on the left who built a fake redneck profile to see the other side from inside, and discovered they were exactly the same as him: same concerns, different shade, families and livelihoods and worries; he runs a nonprofit about it now. Mary and I proved the alternative live on this recording: a Floridian and an Australian calmly comparing gun cultures, concealed carry etiquette and hands on the wheel on my side, Port Arthur and the buyback and snake catchers on hers, disagreeing at the end, and fine with that. That’s what civilized people do: sit down, hear each other, keep your own conclusion, and know each other’s. The purpose of the discussion was never to change each other’s minds.

Belinda

Richard Lowe: Let me finish with one story: my sister, Belinda. She has epilepsy, badly, and my parents told her, in so many words, that nobody would ever love an epileptic. She believed she’d be alone all her life. Then she met the man who became her husband, who loved her and didn’t care, and they had five kids. When the school wanted to put her autistic son on drugs, she said no, pulled all five kids out, and homeschooled every one of them through high school. She liked teaching so much that today she owns a school, 22 teachers, a principal, thousands of students at last look, and every year she goes out and raises a million dollars to keep it running as a nonprofit. She did all of it with a condition people would call disqualifying, a seizure possible at any moment. She’s the success story of the family, and she’s my role model.

So: whatever you think is stopping you in life is stopping you because you’re letting it. More than that: turn the disadvantage into an advantage, and yes, that framing comes from a Star Trek episode. I know a quadriplegic online who speaks through a device in his mouth and made a hundred million dollars building blogs. Read Michael Jordan’s story. Get over it, work through it, turn it, and you’ll do fine. Or be a victim of whatever’s going on in your life. Your choice.

Mary Wong: Nothing can hold you back if you don’t allow it to. Thank you so much for coming along today, Richard.

Richard Lowe: My pleasure. I had a great time.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.