»life PERSONALITY “My mother would say, “Why do you keep doing it? You’re not going to perform,’ but I loved it.” But her mother, who lived to be 94, did serve as a good role model. “My mother was always into being fit; that’s where I got it from,” Richard said. “She walked. People used to think she was crazy because we lived on an island in Miami Beach. When I grew up; she’d be walking around the island very fast.” Performing and dancing prepared Richard for the life’s work she would discover in her 30s. “It’s funny — if you do what you love, sometimes it leads to good things,” she said. “And, in this case, when the exercise came along, I was prepared for it in my own way.”
COURTESY MARGARET RICHARD
MATT BURKE
Richard came to Tallahassee in the early 1970s, when her then-husband, Barry Richard, was the state’s deputy attorney general, and later traveled between the capital and South Florida when he was elected as a state representative. She had had a penchant for exercise throughout her life, but in the early ’80s was captivated by a woman instructor in Miami — “she was very androgynous and had tattoos” — who taught a class that included working out with weights to music. “I was just so excited, I came back here and I told my ballet teachers I wanted them to teach this,” Richard recalled. “They weren’t interested at all, and they said, ‘You teach it.’” At a local dance studio, Richard taught a unique workout that combined several different aspects — jumping, kicking dance routines for aerobic benefits, light weights for “body sculpting,” and exercises, usually on the floor. “It just took off,” she said. Ultimately, she decided to open her own exercise studio — and Body Electric was created in all its neon pink glory. Her classes were extremely popular, attracting as many as 40 people at a time. Many of the studio’s habitués are now some of Tallahassee’s most prominent professionals — attorney Cynthia Tunnicliff, The Florida Channel Executive Director Beth Switzer, community volunteer and television personality Berneice Cox, Assistant Property Appraiser Kathy Doolin, wellness executive Mary Barley, and clinical social workers Patty McAlpine and Beth Miller, to name just a few. One of her earliest acolytes was Jane Marks, a local family therapist and former first lady of Tallahassee. After ballet classes were a disappointment for Marks, Richard encouraged her to join “this dancing thing” she had discovered. “I was hooked from the very first day,” Marks said. Marks was a regular at $3 Body Electric classes (“I took ’em all!”), appeared in hundreds of episodes, and helped recruit dancers and plan music and routines for
MATT BURKE
THE BEGINNINGS
shows when Richard was living elsewhere. While their workout “There are so many of us. routines have changed — Jane Marks prefers Hundreds of women; that’s Zumba and Margaret how I met them,” Marks Richard likes barre said. “I think for all of us, it classes — both are changed our lives because it still committed to was that sense of community regular exercise. that most women just didn’t have. She taught classes at 7, 8 o’clock at night, so all of us who went to work, we could all (work out). The women I met there are still friends today.” U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, who started at the Body Electric studio in the early ’80s, fondly recalls the choreographed workouts. “I have always had a passion for dance and would have loved to be on Broadway in a chorus line,” she said. “Body Electric allowed me to live out that dream.” Then she added with a laugh, “And it gave me an opportunity to wear leg warmers! “Every time I hear ‘It’s Raining Men,’ I remember the routine,” Graham said. “I could do the dance for you now. It was a whole lot of fun. It provided exercise, and there was great camaraderie. I wish we had it back in Tallahassee.” The workouts were televised on a local cable station for a short time, but Richard and “Body Electric” hit the big time when her show was produced at WFSU and aired on PBS stations nationwide. It was a relationship that would last 13 years, even after she made a move to Los Angeles and then to Buffalo, New York, after she remarried.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN? The name of Margaret Richard’s Body Electric studio and television series is derived from a song, “I Sing the Body Electric,” that appeared in the 1980 movie “Fame,” a musical about kids in a performing arts school trying to hit the big time. The words are the first line of a Walt Whitman poem that appeared in his book “Leaves of Grass.” The poem was a paean to glories of the human body — both male and female — and when it was first published in 1855, many considered its sensual imagery shocking and obscene.
TALLAHASSEEMAGAZINE.COM July–August 2015
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