Monday, June 9, 1997 | 6:17 a.m.
"Ask me if I'm a meteorologist," Nathan Tannenbaum says.
OK, we'll bite. Say, are you a meteorologist?
"I've been hit by a meteor, does that count?"
Ho-HO! So it'll be quippers for breakfast, eh? It's late morning at The Skillet cafe on West Charleston, and bow-tie-wearing, well-scrubbed, perky Tannenbaum is yukking it up and doing his best to smudge the perception-reality line. Perception: Mr. Milquetoast. Reality: No milk, no toast, but lots of Tabasco on his chorizo.
Nathan Tannenbaum does not seem like a Tabasco man.
Indeed, while handling the weather on KVBC Channel 3, spinning the classics on KNPR 89.5-FM or fielding calls every weeknight from the likes of "Bob the Guardian of the Salt Cedar and the Red Peppercorn Tree" on his KVBC 105.1-FM talk show, he is Bow Tie Man incarnate: mildly unhip, amused, a whiter shade of Wonder bread ...
"... professorial, nerdy," he adds, smiling over his coffee (think Paul Simon, another prime specimen of the species). Also, cheery. Invariably hailed in public by shouts of "How's the weather?" he just as invariably chirps, "Mostly sunny!"
"I'm blazing a fashion trail -- which no one else seems to be following!" he says. Self-deprecation is another characteristic of Bow Tie Man, as is a cool self-confidence. Nerdy demeanor, tough hide: When you wear the bow tie, you are inviting scorn, mockery, the snickering of strangers. You must handle it with aplomb.
"I think I'm a bow-tie guy," he says, forking the chorizo. "It's something intangible ..."
Being Bow Tie Man makes him an ideal weathercaster. Because a bow tie is not an arrow on the finger, an invitation to clownishness, he must be amusing as he fishes for a new way to describe another hot day, yet not undermine the seriousness of his reports on, say, tornado damage. "I want to find a middle ground between being a clown and taking it too seriously," he says. Bow Tie Man must restrain the wackiness, the zaniness that roils within, opting instead for a milder nuttiness.
Yet there's Tabasco on this white bread, an impulse toward the goofy. It's there in the folds of the leopard-print bow tie he's sporting (and "sporting" is the sole appropriate verb to describe the wearing of a leopard-print bow tie) at The Skillet. It's there in his occasional clambers onstage at comedy clubs. It's there in the seductive hilarity he used to bag a hot mate. And it was most certainly there during his beloved "Tarzan Theatre," back in his Channel 13 days, for which he would willingly don a pith helmet and campy attitude to host ancient Johnny Weismuller films.
"I wallowed in it," he says. "I thought it was totally great!" Perception: Bow Tie Man does not wallow. Reality: Nathan Tannenbaum wallowed. And the people embraced him, or more accurately, hugged him in their embrace of the King of the Jungle. "I didn't know how huge he was. There are a lot of Tarzan fans out there. I still get people asking me, 'Where's your pith helmet?'"
It's in his closet, with the rest of his hats.
Bow tie me up, bow tie me down!
At first he resisted that which has come to define him. "Nobody remembers, but I wore regular ties my first year here," he says. That would be eight years ago, when he came here from a TV station in Grand Junction, Colo., where he did the weather as a sidelight to his primary job, hosting the afternoon "Big Money Movie." Before that, he spent years in radio in Colorado and Indiana.
Upon taking the job at Channel 13, Tannenbaum was advised by his agent (yes, he had one!) to wear a bow tie.
"I said to her, 'Pshaw! That's a silly gimmick!'" he recalls. He didn't want The Man trumped by The Neckwear. After a year or so, he relented. "I felt comfortable that I'd established myself as me," he says.
It's a testament to the potency of the bow tie that it helped precipitate his departure from Channel 13. Citing a viewer survey indicating that 28 percent reacted negatively to his neckwear, station brass demanded he switch to regular ties, the other 72 percent be damned. "Things went downhill from there," Tannenbaum recalls, until he left the station in 1994. Six months later he was hired by KVBC.
He has upward of 90 bow ties, his wife reports, although Nate prefers the vaguer "dozens and dozens." "Here's a bit of snobbery for you," he says. "I only wear tie-your-own ties." Because he appears often at public functions, hosting this, emceeing that, he is given many gift ties. Lovely commemorative bow ties. Honorary bow ties. Ceremonial bow ties. Alas, many are clip-ons, and in the matter of tie authenticity, he does not compromise his standards: He will not wear clip-ons.
He doesn't throw them away, however, not simply because they have sentimental value or really cool patterns, but also because he doesn't throw anything away. Perception: He's fussy, fastidious. Reality: "He's a pack rat," says the pack rat's wife, Linda.
Say he comes home with an armload of good-deed plaques. The Nate Tannenbaum you see on TV, Bow Tie Man extraordinaire, you'd expect that guy to walk in the door and nail them to the wall straightaway. Fussy, fastidious, a place for everything and everything in its place!
"He just leaves them in a chair," Linda exclaims. She hangs them herself!
Nor is that the only eyebrow-raising facet of his dark side. For Bow Tie Man is a complex interplay of public bonhomie and private shame: "He doesn't hang up his suit coats!" Linda reveals. "Let the public know!"
Into the eye of the Weather Center
"This," Nathan Tannenbaum says grandly, "is where I put my crap together!"
On one of the TV screens in Channel 3's Weather Center -- which, it should be noted, pales in comparison to the square footage of the nearby set for Ed Bernstein's "The First Step" -- computer-generated clouds swirl over a map of the United States. On a second, Cass is confronted by two cops in Felicia's bedroom, while Shane is confronted in prison by a mysterious woman. Tannenbaum, it goes without saying, is paying scant attention to that nonsense.
"I'm not into 'Another World,'" he says. "I'm a 'Days' man."
There is more to putting his crap together than one might suppose. While Tannenbaum is not a meteorologist in the strict sense of actually being a meteorologist -- that requires a college degree in meteorology, and instead he has a degree in nothing, he dropped out -- he's a member of the American Meteorological Society and pretty knowledgeable about the weather to boot.
"I consider myself a weather reporter," he says, parked at a Weather Center computer, assembling the afternoon's five-day forecast. "I get the data and interpret it in the way I think it's easiest for folks to understand."
Although he puts "TV weatherman" on his IRS forms -- "I wanted to put 'weather dork' but my tax man wouldn't let me" -- his real job description includes elements of computer operation (marshaling weather info from various wire services and Internet sites), graphic design (assembling the colorful charts he uses on the air) and television performer (everything that happens after anchor Dave Courvoisier says, "Over to you, Nate!").
He is smooth on the air, his years of radio honing his ad-lib skills. But, says his boss, that never obscures the man behind the tie.
"Nate Tannenbaum is a real person," says News Director Roger Bell. "The kind of on-air personality the public responds to the best are the ones who are just themselves on TV. They don't pretend to be something else. Nate is who you see on the air, and people like that. We think he's terrific."
Of the difference between Nate Tannenbaum and "Nate Tannenbaum," Nate Tannenbaum says, "There's very little. I suppose I'm quieter, more introspective. But most of the time I'm just me." The main difference, says his wife, is that he's funnier at home.
Nathan Tannenbaum's Tupperware Theory of Love
Perception: Either he's married to a librarian, or the only Mrs. Tannenbaum in his life is his mother. Reality: She was a performer on the Strip.
Nathan Tannenbaum used to sell Tupperware. Asked why, he would offer three reasons. 1) It brought in a little extra cash. "Beer money," he says. 2) It was the stress-free opposite of TV work. "And three, it was a great way to meet fabulous babes who are comfortable in the kitchen," he says, grinning.
Take note, guys: It worked! Five years ago, he met Linda, then a synchronized swimmer in "Splash," when she attended one of his Tupperware parties with a fellow performer.
Let's hear it from her side: "Did he tell you what he said to me?" she asks, as if she can hardly believe it all these years later. "He accused me of arriving late! I told him no, he started early. So that just set the tone.
"Later he said, 'Mom will be so proud that I've finally met a showgirl.'
"I said to him, 'No, no, no, no! I'm a professional synchronized swimmer. If you want a showgirl, talk to my friend.' And she said, 'No, I'm a professional dancer.'"
And Tannenbaum, drawing on his deep reservoir of Bow Tie Man cool and savoir-faire responded in the only reasonable manner:
"Mom will be so proud I've met two showgirls!"
They were married a year later. Credit Bow Tie Man with guile: He got her phone number from her Tupperware order form. Nate, you sly dog!
"He came to see the show a week later," Linda recalls. "We went out for cocktails afterwards, and that's all she wrote!" What burp-sealed their Tupperware love so quickly? "He made me laugh," she says, laughing again at the memory of all that laughter. "He's a very down-to-earth man."
"We'd only been dating a couple weeks and we just knew, knew we were going to get married," she says.
She sounds like an exemplary spouse, not in the least because she demonstrated a certain emotional adaptability: "I even came to love the bow ties," she says.
Host your meeting, rally, roast, fete or stately get-together? Sure!
He is, of course, a member of the Las Vegas Flute Club. But its annual Christmas performances may be the least of his extra-weather commitments. He's out there! Out there visiting schools, out there addressing civic groups, out there hosting events. He is the soul of ubiquity.
"I'd say he does five extra things a week," Linda ventures. "That's a tremendous workload. But that's my boy!"
"I find it hard to say no," her boy admits. His hobby: sleep. "And seeking global peace," he adds. "No, I don't have time for a hobby.
"I realize I may be doing too much when people say, 'You're everywhere! Don't you ever not do anything?'"
He couldn't not agree to host the Clark County Parks and Recreation Department's summer Jazz in the Park series. "He's super!" says Dorothy Wright, program coordinator. "He's easygoing, approachable, he has a likable persona, and he projects that from the stage. And he has that self-deprecating humor."
He does as much radio work as he can, a lingering love from his early career. He hosts "Guess Who's Playing the Classics?" Saturdays on KNPR and has his own show, "Nate at Night," on Channel 3's radio station.
The show's format can be summarized as "whatever it takes to fill two hours" -- except politics. Bow Tie Man brooks no black-helicopter debates with fruitcakes. Rather, it's a gentle mix of humor, yak and public-service information. "We just celebrated our 106th anniversary," Tannenbaum notes, "which is weird, because we've not been on the air six months.
"We have the world's largest nonexistent fan club," he beams. "Everyone is an officer, and no one is a member." Callers are invited to choose their own official title in this faux fan club, thus Bob the Guardian of the Salt Cedar and the Red Peppercorn Tree, or Jim the Lonely Security Guard and Former First-Time Caller.
"We have a large following of security guards," he concludes, the observation hanging there in the waning chorizo fumes. Breakfast over, Tannenbaum hangs around for a few minutes of chitchat. A fellow diner strolls past."How's the weather?" he cackles.
And in the bow-tied, Tabasco-squirted, Tupperworn, loved-by-security-guards world of Nathan Tannenbaum, there can be only one answer. All together now: "Mostly sunny!"
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