Two legends gone in one day….absolutely gutting 🥹🙏 https://t.co/tMZ2hgkM8e
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) July 13, 2024
Richard Simmons was the person who made exercising in public possible for millions of us, mostly women, who were incapable of meeting the Jane Fonda ‘ten pounds of stubborn baby weight’ standard. I mean that literally: pre-Simmons, a size 12 was XXXL in the aerobics section… if you were lucky. It was widely hailed as marketing genius when leotards and tights ‘suddenly’ appeared in the Plus Size department stores, but it was also a blessing for us shoppers!
Richard Simmons, self-proclaimed ‘pied piper of pounds,’ dies at 76 https://t.co/ZMT2mzWrG2
— Post Obituaries (@postobits) July 13, 2024
Worth reading the whole Washington Post obituary, so here’s a gift link:
Richard Simmons, the frizzy-haired fitness guru who championed positivity, exercise and healthy eating, and helped people lose millions of pounds through an idiosyncratic blend of earnestness and camp, died July 13 at his home in Los Angeles, a day after his 76th birthday…
Adopting playful titles like “The Pied Piper of Pounds” and “The Clown Prince of Fitness,” he led classes at his Beverly Hills exercise studio, Slimmons; published best-selling fitness guides, including the “Never-Say-Diet Book” (1980); promoted portion-control kits like Deal-a-Meal; and released hit workout videos including “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” (1988), in which he led aerobics routines to songs such as “Dancing in the Street” and “Great Balls of Fire,” backed by a live band in a gym setting meant to evoke a high school reunion.
A self-described “former fatty,” the 5-foot-7 Mr. Simmons “represented a much more accessible physical ideal” than svelte or muscle-bound peers like Jane Fonda and Jack LaLanne, said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at the New School in Manhattan and the author of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession.”
Recounting his story in books and exercise classes, Mr. Simmons said he had struggled with compulsive eating ever since he was a boy in New Orleans, entranced by opulent French Quarter restaurants and his parents’ home cooking. He “went directly from pablum to crêpes suzette,” weighed 268 pounds by the time he graduated from high school and became a plus-size model while studying in Italy as an exchange student, playing a dancing meatball, a bunch of grapes and an earthbound Peter Pan in commercials for food and underwear….
In a 2024 interview for this obituary, Petrzela said that Mr. Simmons was unique among his contemporaries in “welcoming and highlighting people who were not thin,” including by featuring them in his exercise videos.
She added that while he never discussed his sexuality, Mr. Simmons “brought a new, gender-bending aesthetic into mainstream America,” embodying “a kind of gender-line crossing flamboyance” that was more common to gay nightclubs than gyms. Cultural critic Rhonda Garelick, among others, described Mr. Simmons as “unmistakably camp,” writing in a 1995 article that his “elaborately constructed persona is part cheerleader, part father confessor, and part Broadway chorus boy.”…
The younger of two sons, Milton Teagle Simmons was born into a show-business family in New Orleans on July 12, 1948. His mother, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, supported the family while working as a fan dancer; his father, who looked after the children, had once performed in a vaudeville act and emceed for big bands in Chicago.
To bring in extra money, Mr. Simmons sold pralines on street corners in the French Quarter — work he credited with teaching him how to work a crowd…
Late in his career, Mr. Simmons often noted that he found it difficult to talk with fans and students who told him about their struggles with weight loss and depression. He took their setbacks personally, he said, and cried more than he laughed. Prayer helped, as did keeping busy.
“People need the court jester, so I keep that smile on and keep going out there to do what I do,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2012. He added, “I’m the clown you take out of the box and wind up when you need a good laugh. And then, when you’re done with me, I go back in my box.”
This is hard to explain to a younger generation, but back in the 80’s Simmons was one of the few unabashedly gay-acting men in public life, and Dr. Ruth was practically the only person who could talk frankly about sexuality on network television. Both pioneers in their way https://t.co/18WISm1p7X
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 13, 2024
Dr. Ruth, meanwhile, was a sensation because she was tiny, ancient, and had a thick accent. No one could possibly accuse her of being salacious, which allowed her to talk in complete openness about subject matter that would have brought the FCC hammer down otherwise.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 13, 2024
The famed “Dr. Ruth” Westheimer has died at the age of 96. She spent decades educating and giving advice on everything sex-related. https://t.co/XCs9Jde0Hf pic.twitter.com/kCqDCmTK1X
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 13, 2024
The Forward‘s tribute to “Ruth Westheimer — woman of valor, Lion of Judah and America’s most famous sexologist”:
Ruth Westheimer, who died July 12 at age 96, was called the Lion of Judah by New York City parks commissioner Henry Stern.
The sexologist’s giggly roar was redolent of accents from her own life trajectory: German, Hebrew, Swiss, French, and finally American. Her eventual life and career triumphs were examples of what the French Jewish neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik analyzed as resilience. Cyrulnik’s parents, like Westheimer’s German Jewish mishpocheh, were murdered by the Nazis.
Part of Westheimer’s survival strategy was to not dwell on the profound tragedies in her life as a German Jewish woman. A 1987 coauthored memoir offered surprisingly little of a personal nature and only for the 2019 documentary film Ask Dr. Ruth did she visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims, to find out precise information about when and where her parents were killed.
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Karlstadt am Main, Westheimer found fortitude in a maxim from her Orthodox Jewish grandmother, “Trust in God,” even if this approach did not work for Bubbe during the Holocaust.
Westheimer only survived because she was shipped to a Swiss orphanage just before the war with a few dozen other German Jewish children and grew up there like a Jewish Jane Eyre, tutoring younger pupils, who may have empathized with her because of her diminutive stature and effervescent personality…
Westheimer was helped in difficult times with comparable benevolence. As a single mother in New York with no high school diploma, she was offered childcare by Jewish Family Services while she obtained master’s and doctoral degrees in education, working with Shirley Zussman, a Jewish specialist in family life studies and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist.
A brief stint at Planned Parenthood in Harlem was followed by some adjunct teaching at, among other places, Brooklyn College, where she was fired for reasons she never publicly divulged. But unemployment allowed her time to begin radio broadcasting, which grew into an enduring media career…
Another loving tribute, by Louis Bayard, on “Why millions trusted Dr. Ruth for the most intimate advice” [gift link]:
It is in no way surprising that Ruth Westheimer, a sex therapist of indefatigable zest and zeal, lasted 96 years on this bitter earth. The only surprise is that, in memory, she seems always to have been something like 96 — or at least far enough along that she could be granted the exemption we normally grant the elderly, which is the ability to say exactly what’s on their minds.
And so she did, as Dr. Ruth, first with an FM radio call-in show called “Sexually Speaking,” then a cable TV program, then multiple platforms over multiple decades. At the peak of her popularity, she commanded — and, it must be said, discomfited — an audience of millions, for there was no issue of human sexuality that she wouldn’t snatch up. Masturbation, premature ejaculation, cunnilingus, the differing vaginal sensations produced by penises and vibrators: Everything was fair play. Even the silly questions posed by her prank callers she answered at face value, because the goal remained, in her words, for people to “get some,” and the end game was nothing short of America’s sexual liberation…
It’s hard now to explain her cultural ubiquity to someone who wasn’t around in the 1980s. In those days, you really could be everywhere. On every talk show, TV network, magazine cover, billboard. On the lips of every comedian and politician and pundit. Everywhere you looked, Dr. Ruth was waiting for you. We never asked for her, but, without knowing it, we needed her, because our country’s sexual revolution had triggered a counter-wave of punitive religiosity, which had, among other things, reconfigured a terrifying viral epidemic as God’s retribution against homosexuals.
And so, to many young gay men of that generation, Dr. Ruth was the thoughtful, nonjudgmental voice of authority we never expected to hear, even from the people who were charged with loving us. “There is no such thing as normal,” she would say, again and again, and it had the curious effect of making us feel normalized, or at least part of the vast continuum of human divergence.
Dr. Ruth’s zeitgeist moment ended pretty much with the ’80s, but to the end of her days, she was teaching, writing, speaking, showing up wherever there were eyes to see and ears to hear. Her compulsive need to fill her calendar, as revealed in the 2019 documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth,” had something in common with showbiz survivors like Joan Rivers and had behind it, I think, the same fear of being forgotten.
Maybe she needed us as much as we needed her, or maybe she grasped just how much we needed each other. The orphan refugee whose parents were swept away by the Holocaust would recall decades later “the importance of being touched, of being loved,” and would, in her final years, sound the alarm against human loneliness. From her angle, sex wasn’t just fun and games; it was death’s most fearsome enemy. It was Eros holding Thanatos to a draw.
War for Ukraine Day 873: Day of Ukrainian Statehood
piratedan
they were cultural icons of a time, trailblazers who the kids may know little of and without whom, certain landscapes would never have been crafted…
fat-shaming, gender identification and the issues surrounding them would still be dark closeted secrets without them and they are very much part of the toothpaste the GOP is attempting to stick back into the tube.
Tony Jay
In another, better universe, the version of the The Odd Couple staring Richard Simmons and Bob Ross is still raking in millions on syndication.
SiubhanDuinne
This is a really nice thing you’ve done, Anne Laurie, paying tribute to Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons and connecting the “representation” dots. In their own unique ways, they were transformative. RIP, Ruth and Richard.
Gretchen
@SiubhanDuinne: Well. said. They both let a wider variety of people feel seen. And the Sweating to the Oldies videos were really fun and made exercise accessible to the young mom I was in the ‘80s.
rikyrah
RIP to both of them🙏🏽
This GenXer also wants to say
RIP to Shannen Doherty
Star of two iconic TV shows of my youth🙏🏽😢
Anne Laurie
@rikyrah: I was the wrong generation for Shannen Doherty… but if the little I remember from contemporary popcult reporting is true, I hope she’s having a great time on the Cosmic Escalator with Dr. Ruth and Richard to cheer her on!
Chet Murthy
@Anne Laurie: I never got into her TV shows. But hooboy did I love Heathers. Damn, just damn.
Rusty
As a young person of the 80’s and growing up in a small town, Dr. Ruth was the first person I can remember talking opening about sex. I have to think her matter of fact acceptance of homosexuality was important for my own reactions when I met for the first time openly gay people in college. (By my sophomore year I had an openly gay roommate) I remember her radio show and it really was formative for those of us of a certain age. I’m glad Richard Simmons got a supportive write up too. TV at the time just didn’t show overweight people at all, except for being the butt of jokes. I can recognize now how he was important to marginalized groups.
At the same time we lose two caring icons, we have Marsha Blackburn, chairperson of the GOP convention and US senator saying Griswold needs to be overturned. Access to contraception and privacy in the bedroom are at serious risk, a Trump win will only further embolden the court and allow him to further stack it with reactionaries. Maybe it’s better the Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons aren’t won’t have to see what this country is becoming.
WereBear
@Tony Jay: That warms my heart!
Both unique individuals, which disproves the MAGA assertion that we should all be the same!
Tony Jay
@WereBear:
The Hard Right – Protecting Individual Rights Through Enforced Conformity Since Ugg First Felt Jealous Of Igg’s Sabretooth Fur Short-Shorts
WereBear
@Tony Jay: Europe sent us their religious fanatics. I can see why.
I’ve decided it’s both genetic and cultural. Being raised in fundamentalism, of any kind, stunts the mind.
Takes effort to keep that effect from being permanent.
Suzanne
@rikyrah: Agreed. I am surprisingly sad about Shannen Doherty. I know she was “difficult”, but so what? An icon for those of us of a certain age.
Richard Simmons was not “of my era”, but he always seemed like such a kind person. Fat shaming is terrible and he was never that person. We could use more people like that.
TinRoofRusted
Dr. Ruth lived in my old building in northern Washington Heights or Hudson Heights as it is now called. She was very nice and would play hide and seek with my daughter in our building lobby. She looked and sounded in person just like she did on TV, down to the suits she would wear. I have since moved back to the neighborhood though not to the same building but never saw her again. There is a small area in Fort Tryon Park that is labeled Dr. Ruth’s Tulip Garden. The tulips are long gone but I walked by yesterday and saw flowers and a sign that said Rest in Peace neighbor. She was an amazing woman and neighbor. I read an interview of her where they asked why she still lived there, she could move anywhere in the city. She got offended and talked about how wonderful the neighborhood is and how she had everything she wanted just there. RIP Dr. Ruth.
NotMax
That Simmons was from Nawlins is surprising. What accent he had sounded straight outta da Bronx.
eversor
I still love me some Richard.
WereBear
They were both good-hearted, and themselves, which is an irresistible combination in my experience.
raven
@NotMax: The two are very similar
Princess
Both Jews. I did know that about Simmons. I remember listening to Dr Tuth late st night in college. Richard Simmons became part of high school gym class and I was this much less of a fan!
NotMax
@raven
Aha!
Mousebumples
I was a child in the 80s so less familiar with the backgrounds of Simmons or Dr. Ruth. Thanks for this!
Re – Shannen Doherty, I read yesterday that her insurance lapsed at the most inconvenient time. But the time she got it fixed, her cancer had spread and was less curable. 😢
We need better healthcare – improve upon Obamacare
Eta, link – https://www.prevention.com/health/health-conditions/a61599353/shannen-doherty-on-cancer
TBone
@TinRoofRusted: awwww, thank you for that.
prostratedragon
They all gave us something, and will all be missed. I only knew of Shanon Doherty from Heathers, but that was enough for me to remember immediately who she was. Likely that most people have seen it, but if not, recommended. And show it to your teens.
HinTN
@NotMax: Dat yat accent has a similarity.
Of course @raven got there first and mo betta.
gene108
@Mousebumples:
☹️☹️☹️
I didn’t know the part about the insurance. That’s awful.
Loved “Charmed”. Never got into “Beverly Hills 90210”. Liked her in “Mall Rats”.
My brother’s 53. Makes her death hit differently because she’s a few years older than me.
BellyCat
Both were eye-opening in profoundly beneficial ways and humanity is better for their boundary expanding efforts. Rest In Power!
Mousebumples
@gene108: yup. From what I’ve been reading on medical bsky, this situation (insurance lapsed, missed/delayed cancer diagnosis or care) isn’t uncommon. Which just makes a terrible situation even worse.
Cliosfanboy
I remember Dr. Ruth appearing on TV (I think it was on 60 Minutes) and my paternal grandparents went absolutely nuts! They were yelling at the TV and my grandfather was actually sputtering he was so angry just looking at her.
Trivia Man
RIP to both, they gave so much joy and support fir so many years. Kindness, unapologetic frankness, and absolutely fearless. A testament to helping others.
JML
I always liked Shannen Doherty. Good actress, even when she got pigeon-holed into “bitchy” roles she still showed an empathy and depth (when appropriate) that rounded out the character more than the writing provided. I suspect she would have done better in today’s version of Hollywood than the 90’s, when her refusal to just take it labeled her as “a problem”. And, dang, she fought so hard against that demon cancer and I respect her openness about her health.
Dr. Ruth & Richard Simmons were delightful weirdos who had genuine caring for people. I think we’ll see people like them again, but never with the same kind of ubiquity and breadth of fame. They opened a lot of doors and helped a lot of people.
NYCMT
@TinRoofRusted: you lived in 900? My goodness the world is Small, my parents moved in in 2004 and Karola Siegal Had been friends with my father’s first cousin Ilse in Frankfurt since the 1960s. My cousin Gary used to drive her around, and my parents had a sweet friendship with her. I’m Ruth and Dadgoing to link to a picture on her obituary page, she is visiting with my father in the front entryway in his last months of hospice.
Zelma
@Mousebumples:
It happens all too often. My cousin messed up his Tricare coverage; something changed and he didn’t keep on top of it. He didn’t get treated for a very treatable cancer until too late. He died last November age 62. A friend lost his insurance when he was let go during the post 2008 recession. He knew he had a persistent cough, IIRC, but didn’t get it looked at. Died of cancer at 55 or so.
What’s paradoxical is that when the cancer had spread and become obvious, both were admitted to some kind of state program. So the state paid for some very expensive treatments that didn’t work rather than much less costly treatments that might well have saved them.
Great medical system we have.
Mousebumples
@Zelma: Oooh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry for your losses. May their memories be a blessing.
UncleEbeneezer
@JML: It’s crazy how Hollywood casts people simply based on fitting a stereotype of our society. Doherty probably got type-cast as the mean-girl simply because she had a serious face (resting, b*tch face, as we would say nowadays). Which of course is totally common and says absolutely nothing about someone’s personality. And on the flip side, lots of actors/actresses get typecast playing “good guys/girls” because of how their faces default to something we see as warm/kind. Unsurprisingly, we often find out that many of the people who play the bullies/bad-guys/mean-girls are some of the nicest people on Earth, and some of the people who play the sweet/warm good people are actually monsters in real life.
UncleEbeneezer
A comedy podcast I was listening to just yesterday remarked the truly ahead-of-their-time attitude of tolerance for LGBTQ, Women and Not-Size-2 People that both Dr. Ruth and Simmons showed throughout their careers. They were absolute staples of my 80’s childhood, and from all I’ve seen, were both really nice, authentic people. RIP to them both. And Doherty too.
UncleEbeneezer
For those that don’t use Xitter, the above Richard Simmons tweet also linked to a legendary performance he had on Whose Line Is It Anyway? (YouTube video). Absolutely hilarious!
bluefoot
@Mousebumples: Someone I know who works in Hollywood told me once that this is one reason actors (including big names) do commercials. I don’t recall the details but something about a minumum number of working hours in order to keep their health insurance. It’s better now with the ACA, but one can still have lapses in care.
My brother recently died in part because he had crappy insurance through his employer and it took too long for diagnostic tests.
bluefoot
I was in high school and college in the 80’s and while my peer group acted “too cool” for Dr. Ruth, we all listened for advice and information under the guise of listening ironically. It’s also hard to understate the need for frank and honest discussion of sex in the 80s – the push from the religious right, the AIDS epidemic, more women entering the workforce and navigating relationships, etc. You couldn’t look things up on the internet, and good sources of information were rare. I think I spent a lot of my early adulthood undoing the bad-to-harmful stuff I had learned as a youth.
cain
for all the frank talk on dr. ruth – and I do enjoy her – she didn’t do much kiss and tell – nor did her lovers. :)
Pink Tie
My dear father, who just died in February, was a psychology professor and human sexuality educator who co-authored a college psych textbook with Ruth about 20 years ago. It was titled “Human Sexuality: A Psychosocial Perspective.” I can’t tell you how sweet and friendly she was, and she & my parents remained friends until their deaths — she went on vacations with them and invited my sisters & me to visit in NYC, and sent my children baby gifts. My favorite memory about their friendship is that her very distinctive accent sounded identical to my dad’s grandmother’s heavy German/Yiddish accent and he could imitate them so accurately that it was astounding. My great-grandmother died when I was still a baby, and I think one of the reasons Dad adored Ruth is because he lost Rose Marx (yes, the Marx Brothers are my cousins!) and felt close just because of that voice and attitude. Our family absolutely loved her, and we all feel torn apart not only for her loss, but also because it makes our father’s death feel so much more immediate all over again. It’s been a tough few months. I’m crying as I write.
Richard Simmons – a treasure and obviously one of the angels we rarely meet on Earth.
StringOnAStick
@Pink Tie: Thank you for sharing your personal connections, I love reading about those. How lucky to have known such interesting and lovely people! May their memories be a blessing and give you comfort. My condolences on the loss of your father.