Sheila Simmons looks for Minnie Riperton, finds herself

SOMETIMES you make grand plans, and then life happens, as former Daily News reporter Sheila Simmons can attest.

When I met her, back in 1991, she was a business reporter and Miss "It" around town, active in such organizations as the Urban League Young Professionals and also the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. The bashes she threw were famous. Our group of friends was sad when she left the City of Brotherly Love, in 1994, for a plum gig at the Cleveland Plain Dealer covering entertainment.

As part of her new job, Simmons got some sweet assignments, such as traveling to Acapulco to interview Halle Berry and to Los Angeles to talk to Sandra Bullock. She once even interviewed Common, who was on a pay phone in Chicago, during the winter. Somewhere along the way, though, she fell out of love with newspapers and also with hip-hop music, which she'd been assigned to cover. Faced with similar disillusionments, a whole lot of us just soldier on, white knuckling it through with our eyes fixed firmly on our student-loan debt, credit-card bills and car loans.

Not Simmons.

In 1999, she put in her three-week notice at the Plain Dealer, loaded up her white Mazda MX3 and set off on a quest to write a biography about her childhood idol, the late 1970s-era singer Minnie Riperton.

A lot of people don't readily remember Riperton. But when you attempt to sing to them a few lines from her classic, "Lovin' You," then it all comes flooding back - the beautiful African-American songstress who could hit piercingly high notes that no one else could.

"Lovin' you is easy 'cause you're beautiful. / Makin' love with you is all I wanna do. / Lovin' you is more than just a dream come true. / And everything that I do is out of lovin' you . . . "

A voice like hers doesn't come around often. Simmons was 9 years old in 1975 - the year that "Lovin' You" made it to No. 1 on the Billboard chart. She would listen to the song as she was being driven to and from school. A painfully shy child, Simmons found the lyrics about love and the springtime calming.

There were lots of great singers back then, but none with the kind of musical range of Riperton. I was a huge fan of her music. I'll never forget the album cover featuring Riperton wearing a pair of denim overalls and carrying a melted ice cream cone. For my senior prom, I wore a halo of pink baby's breath flowers in my hair-a trend popularized by Riperton.

I was stunned when Riperton died of breast cancer in 1979. She was just 31 and "Memory Lane" was just making its way up the charts.

That song, along with "Lovin' You," have since come to be considered classics and still pop up on oldies radio playlists. One day while still in Cleveland, Simmons found herself again transfixed by Riperton's music.

"I stumbled on this photograph, it kind of made me laugh. / It took me way back, back down memory lane. / I see the happiness, I see the pain. / Where am I? Back down memory lane . . . "

Simmons found herself analyzing Riperton's lyrics, wondering about the woman who sang them and who in Riperton's life had caused such happiness and pain?

"Save me save me save me," Riperton sang.

"A way forward, to 'save' myself, started forming in my head right then," Simmons writes in Memoir of a Minnie Riperton Fan.

Before long, she was in Chicago and then Los Angeles, trying to piece together the threads of Riperton's life. She met plenty of resistance. Riperton's husband, Richard Rudolf, wasn't interested in being interviewed.

"The time isn't right," he told her, even before she'd left Cleveland.

But Simmons pressed on, interviewing friends and music-industry associates, all the while battling with her own self doubt as well as the direction of the project. She fell in and out of love and wound up back in Philadelphia, where she was a charter member of the Evening Star Writers Group, to which I also belonged. We could see she had a great concept and just needed to forge ahead.

But if you've ever attempted to write a book while holding down a full-time writing job and also having some semblance of a social life, then you know how hard that can be.

Plus, there were more career and life challenges ahead - such as a foreclosed property she bought with a tenant already inside who refused to move. She also gave birth to a son who was born prematurely, and she set out to raise him mostly on her own. Eventually, she wound up as the press secretary for Mayor Nutter's re-election campaign.

I'm happy, though, that Simmons returned to Memoir of a Minnie Riperton Fan.

I read the 161-page paperback during a road trip to Canada and found it an easy but compelling read that's part celebrity biography and part coming-of-age story about not one but two talented women determined to live life on their own unconventional terms.

"While Minnie pursued a legacy in song, the one she crafted was in love," Simmons writes. "And if home is where the heart is, I found my way there through Minnie Riperton.

"You never know where life is going to take you," she adds.