Strike a Pose with Josh Varozza
Dec 30, 2016 10:57AM ● By Tom Mailey
Josh and his son Tyler
Josh Varozza would look right at home in a biker bar or a 19th-century lumber camp. He’s big. He’s hairy. His tattooed forearms are the size of salmon. He’s a bail bondsman! Yep, Josh could be a very intimidating dude…as long as he's not dressed up like a mermaid or lying across the hood of a vintage pickup in a pair of red polka dot boxer shorts.
The burly former Oak Ridge High School student has become perhaps the unlikeliest global heartthrob ever, via a series of what are called “dudeoir” photos. You’ve probably seen them. If you haven’t, you must not be online.
Photographer Tami Bears of Artistic Photography by Tami had the initial idea. She’d seen a photo shoot with a man that was a send-up of sexy “boudoir” images, and they made her laugh. “But I immediately thought I could put an extra comical spin on it by making it a redneck version, with a logger-type ‘manly man.’”
Tami considered several guys, but none clicked. “I had almost given up when out of the blue Josh posted a selfie on Facebook, and the lightbulb lit up!” She and Josh were already friends. She kicked herself for not thinking of him sooner.
As it turned out, it was a serendipitous moment, because unbeknownst to Tami, Josh—whose personality is as outsized as his physique—had been “wanting to do something goofy for a while.”
Goofy like this?
Um, actually, yeah. “I wanted to do something half-naked!” he laughs. Which explains the selfie Tami saw on Facebook: Josh in a pair of boxer shorts.
Tami shared her idea. He loved it. “...the overalls, the ‘country bumpkin’ theme...I thought it was fun.” Neither she nor Josh had any plans for the photos, other than to share them with friends on Facebook “for a few laughs.”
But what happened next is the stuff of social media legend. Within days, the images had been shared over 50,000 times. Tami got a call from Cosmopolitan, which, along with other media like Good Morning America, had shared the pictures online. Soon, they were hearing from people in France, Germany, Sweden and Australia. “We were both shocked and completely in uncharted water.” A full-time wedding photographer, Tami says, “I was using my breaks to try and talk to foreign media from bathroom stalls!” adding that it has been “both chaotic and fun—all rolled into one.”
They’ve been hearing from regular people, too. Thousands of them. “We got so many messages saying how we made them feel better in their own skin, and they loved what we were doing,” Tami says. But there has been some negativity, too; in the first shoot, Tami included an American flag (“because Flag Day was coming up, and I'm a patriotic girl”), but its use offended some, which she says “broke my heart.” However, most feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
Since that initial shoot on Josh’s parents’ Shingle Springs property, there have been several more, including one at the ocean that was more or less a crazed mash-up of Baywatch and The Little Mermaid. Along the way, they’ve teamed up in real life, too. They’ve started dating.
How many more can they do? Josh acknowledges the joke is probably close to running its course but says, “I don’t know; as long as people are laughing and asking to see more, we’ll keep doin’ ‘em.”
And that seems to be their real motivation, especially Josh’s. Despite his lumberjack-on-a-Harley look, he has a gentle voice, a quick laugh and kind eyes. “We’re in some tough times,” he says. “People need to laugh. And if they can forget about their problems for a minute and have a laugh at my expense…? I’m all in.”
Even if all he’s in are a pair of red polka dot boxer shorts.
To purchase their 2017 calendar, whose proceeds benefit the El Dorado County veterans group, Wheelers for the Wounded, visit godblessamericadudeoir.com
