About Butterfly Video-the finest dance lesson videos & Kathy Blake's Dance Lesson Video collection

Hi, I'mSherry Smythe-Green, Producer of Kathy Blake's Dance Lesson Videos and David Nicholas' Make-Up Application Videos. May I take this opportunity to welcome you to our website and tell you a little about Butterfly Video and how it all began.

At our company Christmas party in 1985, one of our employees asked me to dance. With a great deal of embarrassment, I had to decline the offer and admit publicly that I couldn't dance. I felt awful, stupid, socially inadequate, and terribly unhappy. The incident actually made me feel ill.

Finally, after years of dreading social occasions where couples would be dancing while I sat on the sidelines wishing that I could dance, knowing that I didn't know how and was too shy to go to dance class, I decided to do something about my social ineptness. I asked my husband,Wayne, if he would learn to dance with me if I got a dance lesson video from the video store. That way we could learn in private and not be further embarrassed if we goofed or didn't catch on fast enough. Also, no one would have to know we were learning to dance at this late date in our lives, if we used a video in the privacy of our home. He agreed.

The only problem was that there were no video dance lessons available. Believing in the iceberg theory (seeing 2% of something with 98% hidden), I felt there surely were other people in the same social boat as Wayne and I who wanted to learn to dance but couldn't or wouldn't go to a dance class because of shyness and/or inconvenience. Recognizing a niche for a new product, I decided to produce dance lesson videos and sell them by mail order; and thus, in some small way make other people happy and give them the opportunity to enjoy social dancing as I always wished I could.

Whenever I spoke with local dancing enthusiasts about my "project," they suggested that I contact Kathy Blake, who taught dancing in a town about an hour away from my farm. Kathy had a fine reputation as being a great teacher as well as an award winning competitive dancer. Word was that if you wanted to win contests you either had Kathy as your teacher, partner, or both, or you didn't win.

The day after Christmas 1985, I phoned Kathy and left word on her answering machine that I wanted to produce dance lesson videos, perhaps with her. We met January, 1986, and Butterfly Video was born. Butterfly was the name chosen because of the implications of social butterfly--no more wallflowers!

Our musician was recommended by every musical contact I made to find a pianist. What a lucky break. He's a genius and can play and compose just about any kind of music you'd ever want to dance to. And does.

I booked a TV studio and set up my production budget which I met with $10 to spare. By mid-March Kathy had made five videos, and by the following fall our customers were asking for more titles, which we made by scheduling taping sessions twice a year thereafter. This pattern of customer requests and Kathy teaching more and more styles has continued through the years, resulting in dozens of videos now available (and more in the works).

One of the funniest things that happened the first day of shooting our first video was when I arrived at the TV studio with our musician and we couldn't find the piano--Oops! Had to rush our musician and a "gofer" out to scout up a rental piano for immediate usage while Kathy and Gene rehearsed. Seems my memory mixed up the attributes of the two TV stations I was working with before settling on the one to use for the taping--and the piano was at the other studio!

After seeing a TV program exemplifying David Nicholas' marvelous work with burn victims and also of his other make-up skills, I contracted with David and produced a series of eleven special make-up videos utilizing his unique skills and talents. You'll find David's Make-Up Videos superb. Special emphasis of David's Make-Up Videos is on different types of people (young, old, slim, Rubenesque, white, black, Hispanic, oriental, female, male) with different cosmetic application needs solved.

In November, 1988, Wayne and I dashed to Europe where Lambada was the craze. Wayne did the R&D shots of nightclub Lambada dancing which we brought to Kathy to study, and from which she taped Lambada, her 53rd dance lesson video. It was released a week before the music hit in the US. This got the attention of the major media and Kathy Blake and Butterfly Video had numerous articles and national acclaim, becoming "instant" successes and Kathy a bigger star.

Since Lambada we've added more than thirty dance lesson videos, including country dancing, and have forty more being edited. People keep asking for more.

I hope dancing is a part of your happy aerobic, romantic lifestyle. Thanks to Kathy Blake's Dance Lesson Videos, our social life has improved a lot. We're learning more dances than we ever knew existed when I started the business.