After Richard’s death, Dan Taberski shares some final thoughts on the legend.
Hey, it's Dan Taburski.
I'm popping back into the missing Richard Simmons feed for just a minute.
Originally, I was going to make an announcement about the new show that we've got coming out, but a few days ago, we all found out that Richard Simmons passed away.
It had happened at his home in Los Angeles.
It seems as though he had taken a fall the night before, and apparently he opted not to go to the hospital to get checked out.
The next morning, Richard's housekeeper found him unresponsive and called the police, and that was that.
He had just celebrated his 76th birthday this past February.
Valentine's Day, to be exact, marked ten years since Richard stepped away from public life.
Ten years since the clock started on the missing part of missing Richard Simmons.
Back then, when people began to express concern about his self imposed exile.
And then when the podcast came out, there was a few weeks there where photographers camped out in front of his home in the Hollywood hills.
The idea being, I mean, he can't stay in there forever, right?
But all they got was a bunch of pics of the FedEx and UpS delivery guys and the comings and goings of his housekeeper, Teresa, who knew, of course, that Richard could outlast them all.
As the months passed and then the years, it evolved from concerning to just kind of like, wow, like a stunt by magician David Blaine holding his breath for days in a tank of water in front of Grauman's chinese theater or something with the tourists and the rest of us just walking around the tank asking, how is he doing doing that?
Eventually, Richard had been so long inside that house that we couldnt even vouch for what he looked like anymore.
Hows he aging?
Whats a hair situation?
He became, to me, disembodied, more of a presence, an energy hovering, emanating from his mansion just above Sunset Boulevard, the spiritual capital of look at me.
With Richard choosing instead to abstain, its almost heroic now.
Now that hes gone, itll become the stuff of legend.