With her infectious smile and warm enthusiasm, she would instill us all with a positive energy, from those who may have never heard of her to those of us who have known her through her programs throughout the last 38 years.

While I was compiling tributes, pictures and notes of thanks from students and instructors to install in the National Fitness Museum, I received contributions from Maine to Hawaii. One student, Ruth Abramson from Maine, wrote that thanks to her 34 years in Jacki's Dance, she is still active and healthy at age 86 and still dancing!

This thing called "Jacki's Dance" is more than a fitness program. Many students wrote of how the relationships that were built, while attending Jacki's classes, have been as valuable as the physical results achieved. We've shared in each other's sorrow and joy. Jacki's Dance feeds our spirit, and soothes our souls.

For 38 years Jacki has provided a forum, a playground or stage if you will, for people young and old, male and female to express themselves through the routines she has choreographed in all of the three programs she painstakingly created with love and affection, all in the quest to provide us with personal fitness. She exposes us to every kind of music from Broadway show tunes to hip hop and country, from jazz to pop. There is no genre she is afraid to include in "Jacki's Dance," " Jacki's Workout," and "Jacki's StrongStep."

Jacki is an innovator, a visionary and a constant in the world of what today's industry has coined "group fitness." In closing, I am proud to call her my friend and my mentor.