"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely
enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to
be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.
One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite
the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling:
"That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!"
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute!
It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here. There's no social reason to drink.
Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?" ­­ and I
got scared.
I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger,
because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand
frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this
most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I
was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
Near the end of that year in Brazil I took one of the air hostesses ­­ a very lovely
girl with braids ­­ to the museum. As we went through the Egyptian section, I found
myself telling her things like, "The wings on the sarcophagus mean such­and­such, and in
these vases they used to put the entrails, and around the corner there oughta be a so­and­
so. . ." and I thought to myself, "You know where you learned all that stuff? From Mary
Lou" ­­ and I got lonely for her.
I met Mary Lou at Cornell and later, when I came to Pasadena, I found that she
had come to Westwood, nearby. I liked her for a while, but we used to argue a bit; finally
we decided it was hopeless, and we separated. But after a year of taking out these air
hostesses and not really getting anywhere, I was frustrated. So when I was telling this girl
all these things, I thought Mary Lou really was quite wonderful, and we shouldn't have
had all those arguments.
I wrote a letter to her and proposed. Somebody who's wise could have told me
that was dangerous: When you're away and you've got nothing but paper, and you're
feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you can't remember the reasons you
had the arguments. And it didn't work out. The arguments started again right away, and
the marriage lasted for only two years.
There was a man at the U.S. Embassy who knew I liked samba music. I think I
told him that when I had been in Brazil the first time, I had heard a samba band practicing
in the street, and I wanted to learn more about Brazilian music.
He said a small group, called a regional, practiced at his apartment every week,
and I could come over and listen to them play.
There were three or four people ­­ one was the janitor from the apartment house ­­
and they played rather quiet music up in his apartment; they had no other place to play.
One guy had a tambourine that they called a pandeiro, and another guy had a small
guitar. I kept hearing the beat of a drum somewhere, but there was no drum! Finally I
figured out that it was the tambourine, which the guy was playing in a complicated way,
twisting his wrist and hitting the skin with his thumb. I found that interesting, and learned
how to play the pandeiro, more or less.
Then the season for Carnaval began to come around. That's the season when new
music is presented. They don't put out new music and records all the time; they put them