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

The boss said, "Where're you from?"
"Leblon."
"What do you play?"
"Frigideira."
"OK. Let me hear you play the frigideira."
So this guy picked up his frigideira and his metal stick and. . . "brrra­dup­dup;
chick­a­chick." Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
The boss said to him, "You go over there and stand next to O Americana, and
you'll learn how to play the frigideira!"
My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At
first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly understand them. Then they
keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you find there's a delightful twist to
their way of speaking ­­ their accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must
have had some sort of accent playing the frigideira, because I couldn't compete with
those guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of dumb
accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful frigideira player.
One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school said, "OK,
we're going to practice marching in the street."
We all went out from the construction site to the street, and it was full of traffic.
The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe it or not, there was a trolley
line in which the trolley cars went one way, and the automobiles went the other way.
Here it was rush hour in Copacabana, and we were going to march down the middle of
Avenida Atlantica.
I said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK it with the
police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited.
Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a big square around
our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through our lines. People started to lean out of
the windows. Everybody wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of
the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started diverting traffic! Everything
was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it worked fine. The people were
holding the ropes around us, the policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were
crowded and the traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down
the street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at random!
Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where the boss's
mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the guy's mother, and aunt, and
so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had been working in the kitchen, and you
could see their excitement ­­ they were almost crying. It was really nice to do that human
stuff. And all the people leaning out of the windows ­­ that was terrific! And I
remembered the time I had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands
­­ how I loved the music and nearly went crazy over it ­­ and now I was in it!
By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that day, I
saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the embassy. Next week I got a
note from the embassy saying, "It's a great thing you are doing, yak, yak, yak. . ." as if my
purpose was to improve relations between the United States and Brazil! So it was a