This page is dedicated to Peggy Eckert, our beloved Troupe Director who left those she loved on January 15th, 2007.
This page had remained vacant for awhile while we mulled over what we might say about someone who touched our lives in so many ways. I know, for myself, every time I decided to write something on this page I would somehow distract myself and promise myself I would get to it...eventually. Perhaps it is the realization that she is no longer with us that is the most difficult to comprehend and that if a memorial page were completed it would become confirmation that she was gone. In the ensuing days and weeks, I have come to realize that she will never be gone, that she will always be a part of us. We will speak of her often, hear her laughter, ask ourselves what Peg would do and carry on the tradition that she created here with Fringe Benefit to the best of our abilities.
Peg was a special person...when you stepped into her classroom she made you feel welcome, she made you feel you were beautiful and she made you feel that, you too, could dance if you only believed in yourself. I used to joke and say that she would walk around the classroom saying, " Yes! ", " Goooood! ", " Pink shirt...excellent! " and then she would get to me and my Frankenstein-like movements and say " Uh huh! " Damn...back to the drawing board for me. But she never made me feel incapable or unloved. And that's just it...Peg loved, she loved everyone and she loved the dance and wanted to share that happiness.
Peg never wanted us to take ourselves too seriously. She taught proper posture and movement and was strict about doing and teaching things properly because she didn't want anyone to get hurt. Perhaps she feared that if we became serious we would lose our love of the dance. Maybe this is how and why we developed our sense of humor. It was more important to maintain the sisterhood then it was to be nationally recognized. Afterall, we were wives, mothers, students, career ladies, etc and she wanted to instill in us the purpose of this dance as well as to ensure we always kept our priorities straight.
Peg was sometimes strict about costumes. She never wanted them to drop too far below the hip nor expose too much cleavage. She would say, " Ladies, you can dance, you don't need to sell yourselves." (or something to that effect) LOL...While I can't remember the exact words, we all knew what she meant.
When I would suffer bouts of stage fright she would tell me that everytime she got on the stage thoughts would cross her mind such as, " What am I doing out here, I am too old and too fat and I can't dance." But she would do it and she would do it well and she served as example for women because we all have those times in our lives when we question ourselves. Peg was beautiful and she did what she did well and she would never let us question ourselves. You just got out and did it. And thank goodness because if we all stopped doing the things we wanted to do because we questioned ourselves then we would not really be living would we? I know my life would not be as full as it is now if my love of dance wasn't nurtured and supported as well as given the chance and thats what Peg did, she gave me and, well, all of us a chance. All we had to do was work hard. For this, I will be forever grateful and I know the rest of the troupe is as well. And Peggy, well she lived, she lived life to the fullest and she danced, she really danced.
As we proceed into the future and the unknown, we know it won't be easy but we feel confident in moving forward because this is what Peg would have wanted. She would have said something like, " Cool beans!" and " Don't take yourselves too seriously!" Well don't worry Peggy, we won't. Actually I don't even know if we are capable of that. We love you and we miss you but we know that everytime we go out you will be with us in spirit and we will do our best to do you proud.
Chuck and Jess, if you are reading this...as our number one fans and honorary members, you are not...read NOT, off the hook. We expect full participation in our most special events. Chuck, you will serve as MC and camera man on occasion and Jess?.... We want you to know your mom loved you with all her heart and spoke of you often. She was proud of you and wished only happiness for you and well honey, you have a few moms now and we will be checking in from time to time to make sure you seek and obtain all the happiness that you deserve. You are beautiful woman, never, ever forget this. ;)
So...I'll shut up now and leave the page open to comments and contributions. Please feel free to write if you, or someone you know, have something to share.
Eulogy for Peggy Eckert - 1/19/2007
Hello friends,
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Reverend Norma. I’m from the Druid Grove where Peg celebrated the holidays for the last several years. I’ve also been a friend of Peg’s for a very long time. I’m here today to talk about Peg and about our grief. I’m going to keep this short and I’m going to try really hard not to burble at you, but please forgive me if I do. I loved Peggy very much.
We humans take a lot of things for granted. We take for granted that day follows night and night follows day. We expect the moon to wane and then wax. We expect the seasons to follow each other in succession through the year. And we expect to have our friends and family around us. We forget how fragile our world can be. We forget how frail a human life is until we lose someone. And today we are all united in shock and grief at the loss of Peggy.
Margaret Ann Dunn Eckert. Okay, how many of you knew that was Peggy’s full name? I sure didn’t and I’ve known her for over 20 years. But that’s just like Peggy -- she was so full of life and had so many friends that it’s like she led several lives at once.
Her great love was her family. She and Chuck -- whose name I just discovered yesterday, by the way, is Edward -- she and Chuck had dated since they were teenagers. They married in 1976 and after a big 36 hours of married life together, moved to Japan and lived there for 9 1/2 months. Did you know that? Peg and Chuck celebrated their 30th anniversary last November and after all those years and lots of adventures and trials and travels and life together they were still best friends. And I know you knew that.
Peg loved her daughter Jess with a fierce and boundless love. Chuck and Peg wanted a daughter very much and when Jess came along it was an amazing and wonderful change in their lives together. I guess most people who speak of a mother and daughter speak of love. But not all of them speak of pride. Peggy was really proud of the young woman Jess grew up to be. She was proud of the fierce love and loyalty that Jess has for her friends and family and proud of the big-hearted compassion that Jess has for all those around her.
Peggy loved great big family gatherings. She loved to see her family from Florida and her family right here in New Jersey. She loved watching the kids in the family grow up and the next generation starting. A holiday with everybody together and that great huge loud mass of loving chaos was Peg’s favorite place to be.
A lot of you knew Peggy as a dancer. Her bellydance troupe, Fringe Benefits, was one of her greatest joys in life. She loved dancing and she loved teaching and motivating people to dance. Peg loved getting people involved. And when you were around Peg you pretty much had no choice but to get involved -- her enthusiasm was so infectious. Peg’s bellydance troupe gave her the opportunity for two things she loved: tribal bellydance and bending the established rules a little bit. I’ve heard about the year at Rakasa, a traditional tribal bellydance showcase, when you Fringe Benefits folks danced to Aretha Franklin’s Respect. You shocked them, you delighted them, you impressed them. You brought the house down.
I, personally, knew Peggy most from her time with our Grove and with the local community. I remember her giving brilliant classes in Tarot card reading and belly dancing for Rutgers University students. I remember her downright scary and really beautiful portrayal of Demeter from years ago. I remember her dressed in green and brown with leaves in her hair honoring Mother Earth at last Fall Equinox. I remember her helping out and dancing like a Goddess at last September’s community picnic. Most vividly, I remember Peg in a gorgeous red dress and a sexy Santa hat with black fur trim at our last Yule celebration. She took a part in our silly Yule play as the Sun and she laughed as we pelted her, and each other, with pompoms. I know all of us who were there are going to remember that for a long time.
And there are lots of other friends I haven’t mentioned. She had friends from her gaming groups and friends from her work and probably friends in every supermarket and restaurant she frequented. Peggy was the kind of person who made friends all over the place. And she took care of her friends. It was her nature to be the World’s mom and to look after everybody she knew. She did that gently, and if you think she wasn’t looking after *you* too, it’s probably because she did it so gently that you didn’t even notice.
The most amazing thing about all of that, is that she’d be astonished by the number of people who are here today. I think she wouldn’t have expected this at all. Because, as often as we all told her, I think she never really realized how incredible she was. But we all know that and we all know how important she was to our lives. And so we all grieve together and wonder how she could be gone.
We humans take a lot of things for granted. We take for granted that day follows night and night follows day. We expect the moon to wane and then wax. We expect the seasons to follow each other through the year. We forget how fragile our world can be. We forget how frail a human life is until our hearts are breaking. I wish I could offer some words, something that could explain why this happened, but I don't have those words. I don't think they exist. But if we who are here today can learn the lesson of treasuring each other and our fragile lives: If we can comfort each other and talk to each other and forgive each other and appreciate each other and love -- If we can love each other and love life -- that’s the best tribute we could ever pay to Peggy. And I know it’s the one she would have wanted most.
Thank you for letting me speak. This service is over - go in Peace and Blessings and in love.
(Service performed by Reverend Norma Hoffman, Grove of the Other Gods, ADF, 1-19-2007)
http://www.othergods.org/pegeulogy.html
A Toast for Peg :
A Parenthesis in Time
by Barbara S Rauckman
February has been named “Heart Awareness” month, most assuredly because Valentines Day occurs in it. The medical community wants us to take care of our hearts and our lives and to be aware of our health risks. With that in mind I will begin my speech entitled, “A Parenthesis in Time”.
Our lives are indeed a parenthesis in time. As King Solomon eloquently recorded in the 3rd chapter of Ecclesiastes,
“There is a time for every event under heaven—
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance.”
For each of us, there are smaller segments of time that apply to the stages of our lives (our childhood, our high school days, young adult to elderly), our interactive roles with others (being a child, a parent, a friend, a spouse), and our passions for the activities that we pursue. I want to share with you one of these “Parentheses in Time” in my life.
It began three years ago in January 2004 when I heard of the sudden death of my friend’s spouse. There had been a cancellation of schools due to a snowstorm, and since both were teachers, they had the day off. She needed to run a few errands and then planned to meet her husband at their fitness center so they could work out together. When he didn’t show up, she went home to find out that he had suffered a fatal heart attack.
He was one month shy of turning 60. In fact, she had secretly made extensive plans to surprise him with a trip to
At the wake another friend told me that life is short and encouraged me to get out and meet people. What she really meant to say was that I should try to meet another man since she knew that it had been five years since my divorce. She recommended that I take lessons in ballroom dancing like she and her husband had been doing. This activity had improved their health, their relationship and revitalized their stale marriage. They had become dance fanatics.
I took her advice and inquired, but the next ballroom dance class was full. However, there was room in the Mediterranean dance class if I were interested. I asked, “What was that?” The woman in charge of registration responded, “Belly Dancing”. I had rarely danced since college and had never taken any formal lessons, so I decided to give it a whirl.
I expected that the belly-dance teacher would be like the slender young maidens that danced before the Pharaoh in the “10 Commandments” or in the Arabian Nights movies that
For almost ten years Peggy had taught in
The class of 20 to 25 women was truly a diverse mixture: from high school girls to gray-haired grandmothers, from the slender to the well endowed, and those with rhythm to those quite awkward with no sense of timing. I fell in the latter category for sure. Peggy began by teaching us the dance posture, shoulders up and back, hips tucked and knees loose. She showed us how we could even lose 2” around the middle by standing up straight!
The movements were quite difficult as she taught us to move and separate our various muscle groups, 1st the chest slide, then the hip slide, then circles of the chest, and circles of the hip without moving the other parts. Next she taught us how to move our hands in graceful hand florios, then snakes arms, hip lifts and hip drops. She pointed out that the half-time shimmy was merely the way that we used to walk in Junior high and high school. As adults we had become uptight and locked our hips and walked stiffly. We now had to relearn how to walk freely with a wiggle. There was also the Mayan, the Taxim, the Egyptian, the Arabic and the full-time shimmy.
The music was mysterious and exotic sounding, often in a foreign language, and there was definitely a strong beat that reverberated throughout. She told us that none of us would become belly dancers in just eight lessons, but we will learn things that will be relevant to other types of dancing and help us to move more gracefully and rhythmically. She would throw in songs from the 50’s to contemporary music that helped us apply the dance techniques to familiar melodies that we knew. Who would have thought that you could belly dance to Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T or “She wore an itsy bitsy teeny-weeny yellow poked dot bikini”!!
The 8th lesson was always a Hafla, or a party of women dancing and sharing the food we’d all bought in. We would dress up with coin skirts or scarves and often watch a recent video of the troupe’s latest performance.
As Peggy said one could only touch the surface of learning this style of dancing, so I signed up again and again over these last three years. I would see some women return for a second or third session and then stop. Every session I watched Peggy patiently teach the same basics again and again working with each new group of women. I watched their struggles, their progress and the women’s sense of accomplishment when they could finally dance and do it with a big smile on their faces. She kept reminding us to smile and have fun dancing!
Peggy shared that pride as she bestowed on perhaps hundreds or thousands of women the love of the dance style that had transformed her life. After ten years of dancing, she had lost 80 pounds and was proud of her body and her ability to dance. She had developed such an incredible control of her abdominal muscles, ability to full time shimmy and the talent to lead her troupe of dancers to perform complex dance routines. She instilled in the women that she taught that they were all beautiful and strong and capable.
This “Parenthesis in Time”, my time as a student of Peggy’s, was closed on January 15 when Peggy collapsed at home and died. She was only 49 years old. She lived her life with great passion and a love of dance, and she left a legacy as a teacher and performer that will live on in the hearts of those close to her. I will continue to dance with other instructors, but it will be hard to forget Peggy, her cheerful smile and greeting, her words of encouragement, and her vaudeville routines of her troupe.
This “Parenthesis in Time” began as an idea that originated at one friend’s wake and ended at the death of another. Take care of your hearts, reduce your risk factors, and know the warning signs. But especially love what you do in life and pursue your passions with a smile!
As King Solomon said ”there is …
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance.”
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