Richard (Simmons) Have I Loved
An autobiography through aerobics videos
If you don’t like reading about weight/body stuff, please skip this whole series!
1. It’s My Party
Richard was my first. Childhood obesity was initially addressed in my case by the appearance of a large laminated poster which showed the caloric and macro content of hundreds of foods. And for awhile, my parents cheerfully suggested that we go on a “family walk” together in the mornings before school and work, even though it was still dark and freezing at 5am and there was just nothing cheerful about it.
The family walk fell away at some point, and then I was left with Richard Simmons: Sweatin’ to the Oldies I and II. I don’t remember, but I think my mother bought these workout tapes for herself, not for me. (She also had a Richard Simmons workout on vinyl, so this seems likely.) They came with a food tracking system called Deal-A-Meal: a plastic wallet in which you would allocate your daily servings of meat, fat, and veg by moving color-coded cards from one side to the other, and two full-color cookbooks, which I read and re-read as if they were novels.
I was pretty young when I started regularly doing Sweatin’ to the Oldies, fourth or fifth grade. I don’t remember my parents ever doing the workout; it seemed as if it had materialized in the house exclusively for me, and it felt a little bit adult and secret. No kid I knew did aerobics. Probably a lot of them did T-ball and dance lessons instead, or something. I dieted like a middle-aged woman.
There is so much that I genuinely don’t remember about all of this. I know, in a hazy and nonspecific way, that kids tormented me at school about my weight, but I can’t actually remember any particular time it happened: what was said to me, who said it. I also remember overhearing adults talk about how fat I was, and making comments about my dad’s weight, too. But what were these comments? I really couldn’t tell you. My brain has simply declined to access any of those memories.
And similarly, I don’t know exactly how I came to have a longstanding hypnotic relationship with Sweatin’ to the Oldies and the Deal-A-Meal Gold Edition Cookbook, or how it felt to do the same exercises day after day. Did somebody tell me to do it? Or was I just picking up on an instruction that was hummed at me from every direction?
Let’s be fair to Richard Simmons, though: He does the very best anyone could do to make this aerobics eventuality fun, upbeat, pro-human. There’s a live band, for fuck’s sake. (The drum kit is, to my contemporary eyes, delightfully elaborate in an ‘80s wank rock way that I could not have appreciated before.) There are screaming saxophone solos and backup singers dressed in Sixties-adjacent costumes. It takes place in a high school auditorium, as if to harken back to the good old days, when you used to dance without purpose or doctor’s mandate. And Richard Simmons is having the most fun. He exudes enthusiasm and joy toward the 16 or so adults doing the workout with him. At the end, they form a Groove Train-esque tunnel so everyone can strut and freestyle. It’s sweet in a way that very few workout videos are. Your Jillian Michaels could never.
Watching it again, it’s kind of wild how intensely I remember not just Richard but every single dancer in the block behind him. Each one has claimed purchase in my lizard brain as if they were the faces of my ancestors. And here I am, thirty years later, going “Oh my god, it’s blue leotard over white T-shirt lady! Oh my god, the lady with the super cool two-tone button down! Oh shit, it’s the guy in the satin baseball jacket who puts way too much zazz on the step tap!” For a relic from 1988, the racial diversity and size diversity and gender diversity is jaw-dropping. (And let’s not forget that Richard is palpably gay in a way that would cause a bit of a frisson at the time.) It isn’t at all like most Eighties aerobics videos where you’re confronted by a formation of dead-eyed Robert Palmer girls. There are all kinds of bodies. Like, there are DUDES. Regular-ass dudes who are doing the kick-ball-change and grapevine and living it up. Some people are rhythmically challenged and constantly on the wrong foot, but whatever. Buns of Steel and BodyFlex are shot on airless San Fernando Valley sets (don’t fact-check me, I mean this in a spiritual sense) and mainly feature women who kind of seem like they wouldn’t light your Merritt Ultra Light even if their hair was already on fire. Bring your humanity to Richard Simmons: It will be celebrated.
And that is all lovely. I have friends who made the pilgrimage to work out with Richard in person and say that it’s magic. I believe them. But all of that humanity doesn’t change the fact that I came to it as a child, not an adult. I was there punching in for a full-time job that I was already aware I would be doing for the rest of my life: trying not to be fat. It’s hard to really feel the celebratory vibe when you aren’t there of your own volition.
Decades later, in a Zumba class, my friends would marvel at how quickly I picked up the choreography and the four-count. Little did they know I had spent hours upon hours of my childhood working out the mirror logic of how to follow the instructor on the TV screen; it felt like I had secretly been in the CIA or something. They have no idea, I thought. No idea who they’re dealing with.
Maybe being a fat kid is kind of like being in the CIA: you have been given operating instructions which those around you are innocent of. You seem like everyone else, but you have a mission. And from your vantage point, you can see the way currents of power run through ordinary interactions and people, animate them in ways they’re unaware of. And beyond that, it’s lonely. Doing the grapevine on summer vacation, when you can imagine for a little while that you might return to school a different person.
Stay tuned for the next installment: Billy Blanks!
Unrelated! I’m shutting down my writing course business, but until March 31, you can still buy and download the materials. So check it out! Including a bundle of everything I’ve ever made for $189 (includes a 90-day novel generator, a novel revision workshop, tarot for revision guide, black moon Lilith writing prompts … lots o things.) I have no plans to sell any of these things again, so if you’ve been waiting, this is it!