AMERICAN FORK — If refrigerator poetry offers a window to the soul, Nyk Fry is one weird bloke.
Consider the following prose, arranged neatly on his freezer in thin magnetic strips: spring fiddle language/lazy egg and boil cook.
Makes about as much sense as the pile of junk crowding his kitchen counter, which includes an electric saw, a green gas mask and an alien made of clay that looks like U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Thankfully, it all has a purpose. Nearly everything in Fry's house — including the toy gun he made from a frying pan and a crutch — is for his Fluid Television show, which airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m.
on Channel 24, the local UPN affiliate.
Fry, 37, describes his show as the mission of a man in shorts trying to find anything interesting to film. Past episodes have featured a traveling stripper named Sapphire Blue, a guitarist who performed with Elvis Presley and a Salt Lake man who paints Fischer-Price toys to look like Muppets, then bakes them.
The man behind the show is just as intriguing. Fry was born in Boston to a Russian woman with ties to the royal family and raised in England by his mother and adopted father, a chemist who works for British Petroleum. In 1988, Fry came to Utah on vacation and never left.
He peppers his conversation with obscure comments like "I used to have an Afro wider than my body" and random references to anyone from Darva Conger to O.J. Simpson. His friends include Super Dell of Totally Awesome Computers and a man who calls himself Ozzy Osmond.
Fluid Television, which Fry calls a home video gone awry, began its run in 1998, when he realized the quirky videos he was making for weddings could draw an audience on TV if he changed the format. He came up with the concept for Fluid Television and pitched it to the local CBS affiliate, which aired it for a year and a half. In August, he took the show to KJZZ, where it ran for eight months.
UPN is a better fit for the show, Fry says, because the channel is "young and vibrant" and its general manager, Kurt Gentry, shares his vision of capturing unique slices of life on camera. Usually, he has to explain the show's concept three or four times before people understand it, but with Gentry that wasn't the case.
The show has already drawn a larger audience on UPN than Gentry expected. It was voted best local show in a 2001 City Weekly poll and has a loyal following. Fry has a two-year contract with UPN to run the program.
"It's not a show for the masses, it's a show about nothing," Gentry says. "It takes the obvious and the mundane and tells the story below the surface. It's a very innovative way of looking at human beings."
While Fry sometimes focuses on the mundane — he once dedicated an entire segment to shaving his head —- his subjects are usually captivating enough that he has little to do in terms of editing.
One of his best shows takes him to a tiny farm town in Millard County to profile a crew of bearded rednecks who perform classic rock in their living room. After the performance, one guitarist, who wears his long red hair in a ponytail, takes him on a tour of the yard, stopping in front of a broken gas pump he hopes to convert into an aquarium.
"I kept looking to see if the red light was on, if I was recording," Fry says. "Because I was thinking, 'This is better than Spinal Tap.' I mean, the dog was drinking out of the toilet."
The show was one of Fry's favorites and fit his criteria for episodes about people who are living lives of passion.
"If they are interested in what they are doing, that's what makes it interesting," he says. "I'm looking for people who still have a glint in their eye and feel passionate about what they are doing. I guess I feel a kinship with those kinds of people."
Passionate may be the best word to describe Fry, although he would choose the word "weird." Besides his bed and a few chairs, there is virtually no furniture in his house, a brick duplex in a quiet American Fork neighborhood. Everything — from the recording studio in his basement to the alien head on the counter —- is for Fluid, which he spends every waking hour working on.
He happily lives alone, admittedly below the poverty line, and also does everything on the show — the writing, the video editing, the narration, the music —- by himself. Living a life of passion comes with certain sacrifices, but Fry's not complaining. He seems to be having a blast. Just last week he injured his leg practicing moves with a female professional wrestler.
"If you follow your passion, you're happy but starving. If you go the other route, you get your paycheck but you're always wanting out," he says.
"I go through moments when I ask myself, what's my purpose? I play around all day and have no savings. . . . But I don't want a Ferrari or something like that. I'd like to live in a cave with a satellite dish and some kind of solar power."
Maybe weird is a better word for Fry. After all, he did write this line of poetry:
"Sad garden gift my tiny friend."
Delightfully weird, indeed.
E-MAIL: jhyde@desnews.com