Perfect Bodies Summer 1999

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I found love on daytime television in the person of a man who's on a quest to change lives, just as his life once was changed. Was it Billy Graham, you might well guess, or a preacher on local access television? Maybe the pope?

The man was Richard Simmons.

I was in a bad way one day, and had abandoned my usual (okay, sporadic) work-at-home discipline for a slothful morning of trash television. A talk show came on, offering diversion by way of a spectacle: several seriously obese people, lamenting the physical and emotional trauma of their condition.

Though the host wore a look of extreme concern on his face, the individuals on the stage were presented more as curiosities than as human beings. Each several times the size of the average person on the street, their appearance was shocking, and audience members (myself included) gawked as they cried and told their stories. But there on tv, under the hot lights of a Maury Povich Show stage set, Richard Simmons didn't stare or shrink from them. He hugged them, he cried with them, and then he wiped their tears away.

Richard Simmons is making us look bad.

By loving the (ostensibly) unlovable, by sharing their pain in order to help them out of it, Simmons imitates the love of Jesus Christ in a way that even his followers often fail to do.

We've all heard it said that Jesus was known for hanging out with the misfits of his day, from tax collectors to prostitutes. But these days, a tax scandal or a sex scandal lands you not on the margins of society, but in the papers. If you really want to get left out of popular culture, try transgressing ideals of physical attractiveness, especially the Slimness Doctrine. Like an untouchable caste, the overweight are at worst despised, at best ignored ...

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