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

She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit, and they both
liked the drawing very much. "Why don't we buy it?" she suggested.
Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right away.
"Let's think about it a while," he said.
She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the same day
and bought it herself.
That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally got it
out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but when he went back to
the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already been sold. So she had it to surprise
him on his birthday.
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at
last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually,
pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they're depressed,
or they're happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it's sort of general
and large: You don't know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.
I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it's in
the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn't
have it. This was interesting.
So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn't want people to buy my
drawings because the professor of physics isn't supposed to be able to draw, isn't that
wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley Wright suggested "Au Fait,"
which means "It is done" in French. I spelled it O­f­e­y, which turned out to be a name
the blacks used for "whitey." But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.
One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn't have the
money. (Models don't have money; if they did, they wouldn't be modeling.) She offered
to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing.
"On the contrary," I said. "I'll give you three drawings if you'll pose once for
nothing."
She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon
her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of
her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was getting pretty good now.)
Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra money by going
around selling my drawings, saying, "There's a new artist in Altadena. . ." It was fun to be
in a different world! She arranged to have some of my drawings put on display at
Bullock's, Pasadena's most elegant department store. She and the lady from the art section
picked out some drawings ­­ drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn't
like) ­­ and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock's saying that
they had such­and­such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody bought any of them,
but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock's! It was fun to
have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in
the art world.
Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own.
Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I
would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I
didn't know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.
Once when I was over at Jerry's, I said to his wife Dabney, "I can never get the