Get Ready to Zumba

FORT LAUDERDALE | At age 7, he mimicked John Travolta and led his playmates in Colombia through Grease routines.

At 18, he taught dance classes for children, and won a national lambada championship.

Now, at 38, Alberto "Beto" Perez - the face of Zumba - has the whole world dancing with him.

"You know that scene in Forrest Gump, where he starts running and then everyone joins in?" says Beto, who has a business office in Hollywood. "I feel kind of like Forrest Gump."

Drive a couple of miles in any direction and you'll hit a Zumba class. About 250 gyms, community centers and others offer classes just in South Florida. Some as many as 10 times a week.

Zumba is an aerobic workout combining salsa, merengue, samba, reggaeton and other Latin dance moves and music. Beto's simple goal: Make it fun. Make it playful. Make people dance.

And they do.

"I'll be standing in line at Publix and hear music and just start dancing," says Eileen Harmon of Tamarac, who takes a Zumba "Gold" class for seniors. "And people just look at me."

It all started because of Beto. And good businessmen and good timing.

"I came to the United States with no money," he says. "But I believed in the American dream. Work hard and persevere."

Beto grew up in Cali. He worked at an ice-cream store as a teenager.

"On my way to work, I'd walk past this dance studio, and I'd always stop and stare inside," he says. "Finally, they closed the blinds on me. But I kept practicing and I guess you can say that I had a God-given talent."

It got noticed. Beto competed in a Colombian TV station's contest in 1989 and took top honors in the dance of the era, the lambada. After that, the studio that once closed its blinds hired him, and he began taking classes from other teachers.

In the meantime, he also taught aerobics at another gym. Zumba lore has it that Beto forgot his aerobics music one day, and had only the salsa and merengue tapes in his car. With class ready to start, he decided to bring them in and wing it. There was no going back.

He made four trips to the United States to pitch what he called Rumbacize before moving here in 1999.

"I couldn't speak English very well, but I knew what I wanted to do in a class," he says.

Finally, an Aventura gym gave him one class. For a month. That soon grew to 22 classes a week in gyms across South Florida.

"I was working like crazy, but it was a happy crazy," he says. "I just kept persevering."

Meanwhile, by 2001, 25-year-old Alberto Perlman was riding the end of the dot-com boom.

"My mom says, 'There's this guy at my gym who's amazing; maybe you could do something with him,'" Perlman says.

The name Rumbacize had copyright issues, so they ran through the alphabet and came up with "zumba," Colombian slang for buzzing like a bee or moving quickly.

They launched an infomercial in 2002 via a partnership with a video company.

"My idea was to sell Zumba tapes, then go on to the next thing," Perlman says. "But people kept calling asking how to get licensed to teach it. So the model changed."