Somehow I stumbled upon the podcast series Missing Richard Simmons and ended up listening to all the episodes at once instead of getting out of bed. It's a investigative documentary type of thing. A television producer, Dan Taberski, who used to attend Richard Simmons' exercise class in Beverly Hills, and socialized with him for a while, is as baffled as everyone else when Simmons stops coming to his class and stops communicating with (almost) everyone, refusing to respond to inquiries of any kind as to whether or not he is OK. On the one hand, people should have the right to make their own decisions about how they engage with the world. On the other hand, Simmons had been an inspiring and deeply engaged mentor to lots of people for years, and when he suddenly cut off all contact and stopped appearing in public in any way, after years of boisterous presence on TV and in a wide range of arenas, it was normal for folks to be concerned for his welfare. His silence was so diametrically opposed to the way he lived his life for decades. Over the course of the podcast's episodes, we hear how Simmons helped people who faced great challenges in their relationship to their weight; not only through his videos, classes, and advocacy, often he would call people every week, counseling them for free and aiding them in making the changes they wanted to make. It's likely that he just reached a level of burnout, and applied the same ferocious determination to his abrupt retirement as he did to everything else he did: losing his own weight after a childhood of being bullied; becoming successful and wealthy with his studios, his products, his weight-loss cruises; making dozens of performance videos that he posted on social media. At the end of the podcast, Simmons continued to refuse to respond to almost every inquiry, but a few people with whom he remained in contact did share that he is OK.
The podcast doesn't spend much time on speculation about Simmons' sexuality or the lawsuit he filed against tabloids that claimed he disappeared because he was transitioning. Maybe he is just tired of all the noise.
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