Janet Fitzgerald
speaker
84 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Janet Fitzgerald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I went and I took the class and I dropped my head and I closed my eyes. And at some point in the class, I cried. I cried because I felt the first little glimpse of empowerment. And I was like, oh, I'm not dead. I'm in there. Okay. I think I can save myself. I can come back out. I can get hold of this thing.
There's no real respect for what's going on. It's just like, it's free. They're coming in and out. There's no real code. But Debbie laid down the law early and she did not let people fuck around in her class. There were no shenanigans whatsoever. There was no crosstalk. There was no coming in late, leaving early. You did the routine and you respected the people that you were next to.
People were just like, oh, come in with like 20 cassette tapes and been like, oh, which one of these do I want to listen to today? And I started to go like. Why would I want to repeat a ride? Well, everyone did. Even Debbie did. Even Andrea did. And I was like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm going to make a fresh playlist every time I teach. And they're like, well, that's ridiculous.
Like, how are you going to do that? And I said, I'm going to do it. Watch.
This meant physically going to a record store and buying it. Every Friday night, it took $100. And I went to Virgin Megastore on Sunset. And that $100 was from my waiting tables. And I didn't have a pot to piss in. And I would sit at hundreds of listening stations all along the wall. And I would listen to music all night long. And I would walk away with 10 CDs because they were 10 bucks a pop.
Everyone else was just like playing old, tired, sped up, like Paula Abdul. OK, that's what that's what we're doing here. We could listen to real music on the bike. And all of the gay boys at the time, even on the bike. I'm like, why would you put a backbeat to Rocket Man? Let's just listen to Rocket Man. So that was a whole nother culture of like the gay boys teaching in West Hollywood.
It was just like that music, like pots and pans. I'm going to play some Counting Crows and some U2 and some Mary J. Blige. And we'll just see how everyone feels about that. So. It was no longer a fitness class. It was like, I'm going to curate this experience for you. You're going to have emotion. There's going to be screaming. There's going to be yelling.
There's going to be transformation on a deeper level than just a six pack.
I'm bringing a bunch of people. I don't want my regulars pushed out of this. I need you on a bike that morning. Do you understand me? Phones were flying off the hook. Everyone signed up. It sold out for the first time. Only Andrea and Debbie ever did it.
I woke up that morning to teach, and I'm going to make sure that I knock this so far out of the park, there's no way that anyone will ever miss another Sunday. They showed up. We turned people away. And I carefully curated the whole thing. We rattled the walls of that place. And there was never a Sunday that didn't sell out like that again.
Because I knew I had the goods, but nobody else, do you know what I mean? I was like, I know I can deliver, but I got to have the people there and I got to have the hype.
Now there's press being written about me. Now there's people in the parking lot trying to pay people to give them their bike. There's people that are fighting for front row bikes. There's like articles about like class and like. The guru this and the guru that, like it just blows up. And then all of a sudden you couldn't get in Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Then you couldn't get in Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. All of a sudden you can't get in Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You can't get in my class.
The locker room bathroom was carpeted. The nastiest carpet you've ever seen in the world with stains all over it that looked like perhaps the toilet had overrun several times. The studio itself was also carpeted at the time. And that was, as you can imagine, very smelly and nasty. We had a mic stand and the sound system was like floor to ceiling. It was this giant thing with these crazy speakers.
I mean, it was so loud. It's amazing any of us can hear at all. The bikes were pretty rickety and the place was pretty nasty. I mean, it was a freestanding building with all of these celebrities. Every celebrity you can imagine in Los Angeles spun in that building. Nicole Kidman, Jodie Foster, Alanis Morissette. I mean, just the list could go on and on and on.
Again, I just want to reiterate the nastiest, smelliest, broken down piece of shit building. It's very unattractive. They did continue adding more and more and more and more bikes because we were like bursting at the seams, you know, and all of us were living the high life thinking we were the hot shit. When I left, it was a big deal. It was a big, big deal.
It was about soul searching. It was about spirituality. It was about going deeper. It was about the next level. You have to understand what year it was, right? Because we opened in May of 99. So looking like a sushi restaurant was everything. Every hotel looked like a sushi restaurant. Every restaurant, even if they didn't serve sushi, looked like a sushi restaurant.
So we kind of looked like a sushi restaurant. I'm not going to lie to you. We had like fountains in the hallway and bamboo on the ceiling and backlit mirrors in the spin room, cucumber water in the training room. Because we had been in such like a scum teaching for so long, I was like, I want this to be special, okay? I had orchids at the front desk and candles. It was honestly stunning.
No one had ever seen Studio Fitness like this. So it put us on the map in that way.
Julie Rice, which at the time was named Julie Taylor, was taking my class. She always rode in about the third or fourth row by the windows. She probably rode with me for a long time without me even knowing her name. And we never really had too much of a conversation either. She was just kind of quiet and like did her ride and left.
Showing 61–80 of 84 · page 4 of 5
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