I've been watching episodes of Bill Nye Saves the World on Netflix. They're a half hour long, so you can almost fit one in during halftime of a basketball game that you're not really interested in anyway. Nye, the host, emcee, science demonstrator, and interviewer, is animated, funny, and engaging: it's easy to see why Bill Nye the Science Guy was such a hit kids' show, winning 19 Emmy Awards over its 6-year run (1993-1998). The pilot of the new show, aimed more at adults, is a broadside against climate change skeptics, and the hard political edge has attracted attention to his own biography and credentials. This turns out to be an interesting topic, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.
Nye is actually a mechanical engineer. He grew up in Washington, D.C., went to Cornell, and, upon obtaining his BS, took a job at Boeing, in Seattle. He worked there for a few years and invented something called the hydraulic resonance suppressor tube, which became a staple of the 747 airplane. While at Boeing, he applied repeatedly to NASA's astronaut training program, never with success, and moonlighted as a stand-up comic; he also volunteered with Big Brothers, Big Sisters and, on weekends, as a "science explainer" at the Pacific Science Center. These were signs of a restless spirit, and in 1986, age 31, he quit his day job in order to pursue comedy full-time. Someone he had met at an open mic night hired him to write and act for Almost Live!, a sketch comedy TV show in Seattle. His stage repertoire included humorous demonstrations of scientific principles, and one night, when he ad-libbed a correction of a fellow actor's pronunciation of "gigawatt," the ad-libbed riposte made an impression on him: "Who do you think you are, Bill Nye the science guy?" In 1993, he conceived of a science tv show for kids and pitched it to the public station in Seattle. He obtained underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy--your tax dollars at work--and proposed the name, "Bill Nye the Science Guy," who would dress in a lab coat with bowtie while explaining, or demonstrating, science ideas in energetic and fast moving segments that owed something to the methods of MTV. It was a huge success with both kids and adults, broke through to commercial stations from its initial home on public tv, gained even more exposure from wide use in schools, ably hyped itself with spin-off type products such as books and CD-ROMs, and, as mentioned above, won 19 Emmys (23 nominations). Bill Nye the science guy attained meme-like status, the answer to a question on a cultural literacy test.
For most of the above specifics, I'm following the Wikipedia article on Nye, which includes the inevitable "personal life" section. The frenzied activity in his 20s, and then leaving a high-paying engineering position at Boeing when just 31 to pursue sketch comedy, is not the profile of a family man, and indeed Nye did not marry until 2006, when he was 50. Or maybe I shouldn't say he married, for it's more ambiguous than usual. The conclusion of the personal life section, wherein Wikipedia explains:
Nye announced his engagement during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and was married to his fiancée of five months, musician Blair Tindall, on February 3, 2006. The ceremony was performed by Rick Warren at . . . the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Yo-Yo Ma provided the music. Nye left the relationship seven weeks later when the marriage license was declared invalid. In 2007, Nye received a protective order against Tindall after an incident in which she came onto his property and used herbicide to damage his garden. Tindall admitted this but denied being a threat to him. In 2012, Nye sued Tindall for unpaid attorney's fees he incurred while he went to court in 2009 to enforce the protective order against Tindall after she allegedly violated it. According to Nye's court filings, she was ordered to pay these fees and, to date, has not paid any of it.
Nye is an avid swing dancer and describes himself as agnostic.
It seems there is more here than swing dancing and agnosticism for Rick Warren to disapprove of. But how much sense does it make? As far as I can tell, Google alone will not dispel the mystery, but making the effort has its rewards. Musician Blair Tindall is an oboist who's played for several prestigious orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic. Though she's received a Grammy nomination in the jazz category, she may be best known as the author of a memoir, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which is apparently a really smart dissertation on the economics of the classical music biz with substantial digressions that justify the subtitle. She met Nye when he called her after reading the book. It's fun to make the obvious inference--Bill Nye, science guy, reading along, being alternately and favorably impressed by the author's brains and "fun factor," and then at some point determining that he needs to place a call. Probably there was a photo of the author on the dust jacket.
Well, as many teenagers could tell you, it's great until it's not. The details about the garden incident and the invalid marriage license remain obscure. Concerning the legal status of the marriage, Nye has said: "We got a letter from the state of California, with the great seal affixed, saying we were never married. So shortly afterwards we both agreed it was not a good idea." Yes, science guy, you agreed, and then she poisoned your garden. Regarding the letter, everyone would be more interested in the words than the seal. Tindall's public statements indicate she's confused, distressed, and brokenhearted. Ah, science guy! Ah, oboist! Ah, humanity!
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