The pod in question is Stitcher's Missing Richard Simmons, produced in 2017, and I suspect my feeling of disappointment with it when it first aired had something to do with a sense of false advertising. In those days, we weren't yet so familiar with the concept of the "literary" podcast, which S-Town and the like were about to perfect and make famous, just a few months later. When we turned to that voice in the ear, back then, we weren't expecting profound insight; many of us were looking for sheer comedy or escapism.
And Missing Richard Simmons seemed to promise both, did it not? It had an irresistible pop culture hook if anything ever did. It was part true crime, and all Richard Simmons—someone whom I'd been told by all media from childhood on to think of as a walking, jazzercising joke. This was, after all, the flamboyant man we knew and loved from Sweatin' to the Oldies, and for decades his name alone had served as a ready-made punchline (probably for unexamined homophobic reasons) for countless late-night talk show hosts and hacky Hollywood comedies.
And now apparently he had gone missing. There was intrigue afoot! Where had he gone? Who had done it? The butler? The masseuse? The show seemed to promise all that was binge-able in one: criminal malfeasance, mysteries and secrets unmasked, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, celebrities behaving badly, all in one sweaty, headband-wearing, bouncing, tiny-short-clad package.
The real show that follows, from actually turning on Missing Richard Simmons, is quite different (though the producers are fully aware of the intrinsic interest of their subject matter, and laid it on thick in advertising—and who could blame them?). Richard Simmons, it turns out, is not just the corny exercise video goofball we all think of him as. He is that, too, of course, but we learn that he was also a transformational figure in the lives of millions. He not only helped countless people lose weight; he also preached a message of self-acceptance and body positivity that was for many people saving.
By the end of the podcast series, indeed, Simmons has gone from being a laugh-line for lowbrow comedians to seeming like a positively Christ-like figure. It's not just that he made videos or took people on cheesy cruises where he offered an affirming message. He also lived out these values in his personal life, becoming a quasi-pastor in the lives of his devotees. The podcast recounts how Simmons would stay up all night at times talking on the phone to total strangers, as he accompanied them through their darkest feelings and self-doubts.
Richard Simmons, in short, had a ministry. And it is fitting that I listened to the show at the time I did—February 2017, right as I was finishing my two years as a congregational intern and starting to put parish ministry behind me (I had just been hired in my first non-ministerial job)—for what I thought at the time might be a temporary respite, but which I've realized since was a permanent break.
So why then, if he was such a beloved figure who made such a real and meaningful difference in people's lives as a quasi-minister, did he just up and disappear one day? This is the mystery the show sets out to solve, and if you don't mind hearing a crucial plot spoiler about a podcast that aired more than four years ago, I'll tell you that the answer is already contained in the question.
In the end, there really is no great mystery or sinister secret. Simmons isn't being held prisoner in his own home; he wasn't murdered and replaced with a body double. He just couldn't go on being people's savior. He had to quit.
This, at least, is the conclusion the show comes to. In the end, Richard Simmons ghosted on the public and the people who adored him because he had given away too much of himself to others, and he couldn't do it anymore. He had been too generous with his time, too generous with his emotional labor. He was exhausted and depleted and needed to retreat into himself.
In hearing this story at the time, I thought of a poem that was then very important to me. D.H. Lawrence's "Sick." In a few short lines, the poet describes how he has become sick because he has "given [him]self away," given himself "to the people when they came [...] they pecked a shred of my life [....] So now I have lost too much, and am sick."
I imagined Simmons as Lawrence describes himself here... as a kind of Christ-figure whose body had literally become bread to his followers... "pecked away," as Lawrence's image goes.
And what I couldn't say publicly at the time, but felt keenly inside, was that my brief time in the professional ministry had been much the same sort of experience, and that in leaving it I had made a narrow escape—just as Simmons had. One that was all the more exciting for having a streak of rebellious selfishness behind it. Lawrence concludes his poem, after all, with a call to Nietzschean self-deliverance that still has the power to thrill me precisely because it shocks me: "I am trying now to learn never/to give of my life to the dead,/never, not the tiniest shred."
It's all an absurdly self-dramatizing comparison, of course. Unlike Simmons, I never literally stayed up all night talking people through their problems. (And this is not to speak to the even more self-aggrandizing religious analogies above). But I did feel sincerely that for two years I had given more of myself away than I was willing to part with, and that from then on I was going to steward my inner self more carefully, and keep at least part of my life for myself.
A friend of mine is always trying to talk me out of this attitude. He tells me a story about a time he made an effort to connect with someone he wanted to know professionally and was rebuffed. "I just don't have time," the person told him. My friend was incensed. He thought this was a sad and impoverished attitude to take. "You should make time," my friend said, "because there's always something to learn from others, no matter who they are." The other person shook his head no. "Even if that's true," he said, "if I made time for everyone, I'd have none left for me."
My friend thinks this last response was at once both selfish and self-limiting, and maybe it is those things. But it also seems to me both right and necessary. Of course, all hard-won insights into human life only go so far. They are partial truths that should always leave room for their contraries. A person who's lacking in empathy and prone already to neglect the needs and feelings of others should probably not be advised to take the D.H. Lawrence principle to heart... they've already learned it too well, and need to figure out how to practice the opposite virtues.
But a Richard Simmons, say... one of the world's givers... they perhaps do need to be reminded sometimes not to give the entirety of themselves away. That they can and should keep some of it for themselves.
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