jQuery Slider (cycle pager repeating?)

I’m not sure if people will need more details to help me with this one. I feel like it must be a simple issue, but can’t figure it out.

I did some research and saw the issue a couple other times on other related forums, but there aren’t answers to the posts. ??

The slider works fine, except that what I use to page each image in the slider, usually only one bullet or image per slide, is repeated. The repeated pagers aren’t accessible, you can’t click them as the normal pagers to go to the next/other slides.

Here is my code for the .js file:

// Showcase cycler
jQuery(function() {
	jQuery.fn.cycle.updateActivePagerLink = function(pager, currSlideIndex) {
	    jQuery(pager).find('a').removeClass('active')
	        .filter('a:eq('+currSlideIndex+')').addClass('active');
	}; 

	jQuery('.showcase .textwidget').cycle({
		fx:     'fade',
		speed:  'slow',
		timeout: 5500,
		pause:   1,
		pauseOnPagerHover: true,
	    pager:  '#showcase-menu',
	    pagerAnchorBuilder: function(idx, slide) {
	        return '<a href="#">&nbsp;</a></li>';
	    }
	});
});

The #showcase-menu id has an image set to the background, just fyi.
I am using a widget for the menu.