Generation Inspiration: Marge Champion

I’m Doug Snyder, and I’d like you to meet remarkable and fascinating elders who are doing surprisingly interesting and sometimes astonishing things with their lives. These people make up what we at Guideposts call Generation Inspiration. 

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I’ve done so many things, and I’m 91, going on 92. I think I’ve been in every form of show business except burlesque, and then I’ve kidded that a lot of times. But it started with “Snow White.” I got chosen because I was one of maybe 200 girls who knew how to dance. 

Donald Saddler and I were engaged to do a performance at Carnegie Hall for two nights along with a lot of MGM stars that we were in the “New York Times” between Christmas and New Years because we were an oddity in New York. By that time, we were well into our 80s. 

You keep your passion alive as long as you can. Dancing is the hardest thing to do it with because the body gets older, but I learned that I could celebrate every decade for what it gave me, not for what it takes away. I can’t do jumps, I can’t do falls, I can’t do a lot of the things that were very second nature to me, but I can move gracefully and tell a story through that. 

And I do believe that when one door closes, maybe it’s an age door, a decade door, if you don’t get upset about it, you’ll find that a better one opens. It’s also a matter of staying positive and not letting– not letting the negative really motivate you. It’s all right never just say no, but there are times when you have to say no. And you have to welcome those times because that gives you time to do something that maybe you were supposed to do or think about things. 

You don’t learn too much from your successes. It’s only when there’s something that doesn’t work that you are challenged and you learn it and don’t let it get you down. 

I would– I would tell people who retire and sit around watching television or whatever they do, I would tell them to move their butts because there is always something that– I don’t care if it’s golf, I don’t care if it’s just getting out and walking three miles or working up to it, of course, a day. You need to keep moving, keeping your passion going. And especially any one of them that has to do with exercise. 

And if you don’t know how to do it, then join a class. Take tap dancing lessons. Try it out because tap dancing lasts forever. So does ballroom last forever. You’ve got to find something that you love doing and doing it over and over again. 

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