Fit to Print Volume 23 Issue 1: March 2014 | Página 24

Back to the Future
continued from page 7

Back to the Present: John, Lisa & Cor

who weren't waiting for her, and where I
could pretend I was her!
John: I remember seeing it. How
aggressive some of those hard-core
Babylon girls were. They'd get there and
they'd look around, and go "Oh! Cor's not
teaching?" And they'd walk out.
Cathy: I had a Sunday morning class, and
could literally not go out Saturday night
because I had stomach problems that the
stress of my Sunday morning class
caused!
Steve: Yeah, and guess who suffered! "So
now all of our Saturday nights are shot?
Great! No, really, I'm sure you’re gonna’
do great tomorrow!"
Kelsey: What kind of a class was it?
Cathy: It was 10:00 am class, and in
those days all we did was call them
"Level One," "Level Two," "Level Three".
That's all there was. That was the
schedule.
Ken: It's true. Level one—"suitable for
beginners." Level two—"suitable for
intermediate...”
John: And then, in the first Step class,
you weren't supposed to go too high, but
Cor would stack up eight Steps on top of
each other...
Steve: But the first Step—the original
step before there were actual
“Steps”—was a milk crate, wasn't it?
Cathy: Which was way too high to begin
with! They were so unstable that we
were all accidents just waiting to

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happen. But Cor would be, like, "This
will be fine."
Cor: And the milk crates were stood on
the high side, the short side, not the
long, low side.
Steve: No!
Cor: Oh yes we did!
Cathy: And we did it because Cor
reassured us with one of her most
famous lines: "This will be fine."
"Really?” we'd all be thinking. “I don't
know if this is gonna be fine..." "It's
going to be fine." If Cor said that it was
going to be easy, that it was going to
be fine, we were all, like, "Ohhh,
OK…let's get on with it!" The Cor
endorsement meant obedience.
Cor: No one ever fell off a crate!
Ken: You've got to appreciate what
high-impact aerobics meant in those
days. The rug in the aerobics room
had a pad under it like the one that
was under the rug in your living room.
Cathy: Oakdale in some way was
liberating, but it was also...difficult.
But in a good way. I worked in Oakdale
a lot, along with Lisa, and there was a
group of us who, without the Oakdale
experience, might not have been able
to move on, move forward as
instructors. The experience of
Oakdale was very valuable to us. It

The first Step—the original
step before there were
actual “Steps”—was a milk
crate, wasn't it?
had a purpose.
John: You might not otherwise have
been able to train all the great
instructors that have taught at Fitness
Incentive.
Cor: It gave people a chance to
develop their skills. By the time they
returned to Babylon, they were really
good.
Cathy: Definitely helped me overcome
any fear or anxiety I had been fighting
during my Sunday morning classes in
Babylon.
John: Didn't Oakdale provide you guys
with ideas you would later use when
you developed the new locations? The
way you laid out the space...
Ken: True. A lot of what we learned
designing and building Oakdale would
be put to use in the creation of the
new space.
Cathy: Oakdale was the first Fitness
Incentive to have dedicated fitting
rooms.
Ken: Main Street, Babylon and Oakdale
were almost echoes of one another.
Desk/reception in front, Boutique, a
main aerobics floor you didn't have to
Spring 2014 FIT to Print

walk across to navigate around the gym,
babysitting in the rear...
Cathy: And Oakdale had a real Boutique.
A dedicated space for the great stuff we
were selling. Very unlike earlier versions,
where these really beautiful things were
displayed on a 6 foot slat-wall. And the
nursery was really nice. In the back,
large, with big windows the kids could
look out through onto the main floor.
Ken: There are current members here at
Deer Park Avenue who started out as
Oakdale members. They are still coming
to Fitness Incentive, after all these years
and all the miles.
Cathy: Every aerobics maneuver in the
old days was done really fast. The faster,
the better…even when the music wasn't
complimentary. The songs weren't fast
enough because no one was producing
that kind of music at that time. The
playback had no pitch control, and so
there was no fluidity to what we were
doing…nothing choreographed at 32
counts.
Remember the Black Cars album by Gino
Vannelli? We would take Cor's class and
play that album with the lights out over
and over. We really got into that kind of
punk/techno eighties sound.
Ken: If you look back on those days what
you really had was a whole lot of
Madonna, along with a little bit of
Michael Jackson...
Lisa: Gloria Estefan...
Cathy: Cueing without a microphone, and
we were playing records! Vinyl! With 20
people jumping up and down, it was a
miracle they played at all.
Steve: Meanwhile, Kelsey and Jourdan
would be busy play-teaching their little
mock classes...
Cathy: With the Barbie headset! Taking
turns being the instructor.
Jordan: I remember that. We used to
alternate.
Kelsey: Except when it came my turn to
be the instructor Jourdie would say, "I
don't want to play anymore!"
Cathy: We actually bought one of those
portable Reebok s