Jazzercise

“When I did the second class, I had 30 people, because each of the 15 brought a friend. And then, the next week, I had 60 people, and the room wouldn't hold any more people.”

“I have always tried to keep Jazzercise apolitical, areligious, you know, all of those things, but on my own, I was always vocal about women's rights, and I was always proud that I was helping Women become business people, and to build a business that they coul…”

“Well, not a class, a month for eight classes.”

“So we turned it around, and we made it into a franchise, and I didn't lose one instructor That I can remember.”

“Exactly, and even today our startup fee is only 12 50, you know, 1250 dollars”

“By 19, around 1977, I was teaching about 30 classes a week.”

“That bank went out of business like seven years after I had talked to that guy.”

“Well, we were doing fine. We never really had to do that”

“So I was 13, and my parents fixed up the basement of our home and made it into a dance studio, and Yeah, and about, gosh, three months, I had a hundred little dancers, little students.”

“Yeah, I think there's about a thousand.”

“I had a customer in the La Jolla Y, where I was teaching, and she said to me one day, you need a name for this, and I said, well, what have you got in mind? And she said, why don't you call it jazzercise, because it's exercise, but it's also jazz dance”

“It never really bothered me because I felt like the people who were celebrities, and of course we have Richard Simmons as well, you know, all getting into it just gave people more awareness, and then they could pick what they wanted to do, but I don't consider…”

“The reason we're the only fitness company that started way back when that's still thriving is because we've made good choices. We have Change through the decades. We've never stayed the same.”

“And in fact, in the eighties, there were two big franchises. Us and Domino's Pizza.”

“The neat thing about what I do today is that my audience is an active one, and when I was dancing in the theater, I had a passive audience. You know, they were watching, but not doing. Now today, I'm dancing on the stage, and the people in front of me are danc…”

“And as I trained instructors, they all got microphones like that, so I really believe I was certainly the pioneer of all that.”

“Then they started to get a little bit more organized when Jazzercise started pulling together kind of dance aerobics in more of a structured format, but nothing ever based on science. You know, it really was this kind of trendy fad type of stuff, particularly …”