The Church Of Jazzercise

If You’ve Ever Congregated At The Altar Of Soulcycle Or Danced The Ritual Zumba, Thank Jazzercise, A Pioneer Of Group Fitness. Five Decades After Its First High Kick, Brennan Kilbane Sits Down With One Longtime Priestess, Who Also Happens To Be His Mother.

One half-century ago, in 1969, a North western graduate and professional dancer by the name of Judi Sheppard Missett taught a dance class just outside Chicago. She noticed a pattern of inconsistent attendance—dancers would attend a handful of classes at a time and then drop out. This concerned Missett, so she started asking them why. They told her they didn’t want to be dancers, but they wanted to look like dancers and were interested in her class as a workout. So Missett did something truly brazen: She pivoted to dance aerobics, eventually assembling the portmanteau of jazz (as in dance) and exercise (as in exercise) in an effort to brand the experience. Jazzercise was born.

Seventeen years later, a marketing administrator and frequent Jazzerciser in Cleveland, with eyes the color of molten caramel, gave birth to her first son and decided to quit her office job in favor of a more flexible schedule. She trained for certification as a Jazzercise instructor and then purchased her own franchise, which she taught in the evenings at a Catholic school near her house. As her business grew, so did her family: Not a decade later she gave birth to her fourth child, a perfect son, who would grow up to write the very article you are reading. The double helix of his DNA is fused together by the power of jazz exercise—every cell in his body vibrates to the rhythm of today’s pop hits. The Kilbanes are, and have always been, a Jazzercise family.

In high school, when people called my house, they were confused to be met with an extremely long answering-machine greeting that informed them of every Jazzercise class available on Cleveland’s west side that month. Also, the Kilbanes are not home, please leave a message. This monologue was recorded every month by my mother, Karen Kilbane, who has been operating one of the globe’s most profitable Jazzercise franchises (out of about 8,500) for 33 years.