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

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girls to pose nude: I don't know how Jerry does it!" "Well, did you ever ask them?" "Oh! I never thought of that." The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student. I asked her if she would pose nude. "Certainly," she said, and there we were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that I thought it was somehow wrong to ask. I've done a lot of drawing by now, and I've gotten so I like to draw nudes best. For all I know it's not art, exactly; it's a mixture. Who knows the percentages? One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a room, she'd be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally talked her into that. Then she had another worry: she's got "dents" near her groin. I had to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it's the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can't see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is. I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one. My "agent" looked at it and wanted to take it around. "You can't sell that," I said, "it's on newsprint." "Oh, never mind," she said. A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden frame with a red band and a gold edge. It's a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. "I think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed," she said. I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings. There was a period when there were topless restaurants in town: You could go there for lunch or dinner, and the girls would dance without a top, and after a while without anything. One of these places, it turned out, was only a mile and a half away from my house, so I went there very often. I'd sit in one of the booths and work a little physics on the paper placemats with the scalloped edges, and sometimes I'd draw one of the dancing girls or one of the customers, just to practice. My wife Gweneth, who is English, had a good attitude about my going to this place. She said, "The Englishmen have clubs they go to." So it was something like my club. There were pictures hanging around the place, but I didn't like them much. They
were these fluorescent colors on black velvet kind of ugly a girl taking off her sweater, or something. Well, I had a rather nice drawing I had made of my model Kathy, so I gave it to the owner of the restaurant to put up on the wall, and he was delighted. Giving him the drawing turned out to produce some useful results. The owner became very friendly to me, and would give me free drinks all the time. Now, every time I would come in to the restaurant a waitress would come over with my free 7Up. I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit. If I got a little tired, I'd watch the entertainment for a while, and then do a little more work. The owner knew I didn't want to be disturbed, so if a drunk man came over and started to talk to me, right away a waitress would come and get the guy out of there. If a girl came over, he would do nothing. We had a very good relationship. His name was Gianonni. The other effect of my drawing on display was that people would ask him about it. One day a guy came over to me and said, "Gianonni tells me you made that picture." "Yeah." "Good. I'd like to commission a drawing." "All right; what would you like?" "I want a picture of a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man's head." "Well, uh, it would help me a little if I had some idea of what this drawing is for." "I want it for my business establishment." "What kind of business establishment?" "It's for a massage parlor: you know, private rooms, masseuses get the idea?" "Yeah, I get the idea." I didn't want to draw a nude toreador girl being charged by a bull with a man's head, so I tried to talk him out of it. "How do you think that looks to the customers, and how does it make the girls feel? The men come in there and you get 'em all excited with this picture. Is that the way you want 'em to treat the girls?" He's not convinced. "Suppose the cops come in and they see this picture, and you're claiming it's a massage parlor." "OK, OK," he says; "<strong>You're</strong> right. I've gotta change it. What I want is a picture that, if the cops look at it, is perfectly OK for a massage parlor, but if a customer looks at it, it gives him ideas." "OK," I said. We arranged it for sixty dollars, and I began to work on the drawing. First, I had to figure out how to do it. I thought and I thought, and I often felt I would have been better off drawing the nude toreador girl in the first place! Finally I figured out how to do it: I would draw a slave girl in imaginary Rome, massaging some important Roman a senator, perhaps. Since she's a slave girl, she has a certain look on her face. She knows what's going to happen next, and she's sort of resigned to it. I worked very hard on this picture. I used Kathy as the model. Later, I got another model for the man. I did lots of studies, and soon the cost for the models was already eighty dollars. I didn't care about the money; I liked the challenge of having to do a commission. Finally I ended up with a picture of a muscular man lying on a table with the slave girl massaging him: she's wearing a kind of toga that covers one breastthe other one was nudeand I got the expression of resignation on her face just right. I was just about ready to deliver my commissioned masterpiece to the massage
Page 1 and 2:
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
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Preface The stories in this book we
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He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1
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could act like a microphone, and yo
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whole afternoon to find a burnedo
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For logarithms it was a big L exten
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very sharp knife into the table at
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and be more relaxed, and vice versa
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One time I danced with a certain gi
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same waitress all the time. I notic
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"Cut it out, Feynman; this is seri
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could find. Before I tell you what
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observations were made while I was
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I decided there must be an "interpr
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company. His father was the one who
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we could do. Our process was pretty
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out of me, because I didn't like fo
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In the Princeton cyclotron lab they
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When it was time to get up and go o
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and animal, are made of little bric
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some other experiment. I said, "Hel
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We figured if we could get rid of t
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do?" I said I didn't know, and he s
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always something I could find in th
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Atlantic City, where they had vario
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though it was a microscope of forty
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lowing" it occurred. I followed eig
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I asked the Bell Labs if they would
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the fuse won't burn! I decided that
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that he wanted to try to develop. H
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Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
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meantime, what instructions go down
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said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
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I looked at it and said, "That look
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people that I wanted were there, an
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different where you go first t
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concentrate on this one. So they st
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it was very difficult. Now, us
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was radioactive. It was plutonium.
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One guy tries to make something to
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Everybody was amazed. It was comple
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it appeared, depends on the same li
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Hoffman is just the kind of guy to
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mathematical constant?" "Oh, no!" d
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of little cubbyholes that contained
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himself! So I turn around, and sure
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"No. Do you?" "Well, I'm keeping an
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partly in the strength of our futur
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have any room either. I say to the
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answered the questions. Everything
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around faster than the wobbling. I
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ar, with all its "temptations," and
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level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
Page 107 and 108: I liked to imitate being drunk, so
Page 109 and 110: you been?" At this moment the guy t
Page 111 and 112: "What?" "That's right," he said con
Page 113 and 114: After that, I tried to do those thi
Page 115 and 116: He was completely washed out, and l
Page 117 and 118: Monday, at the latest. I got all up
Page 119 and 120: The people from the airlines were s
Page 121 and 122: The boss said, "Where're you from?"
Page 123 and 124: eaches, where most people felt thei
Page 125 and 126: super: He answered everything nifty
Page 127 and 128: y first learning to pronounce the l
Page 129 and 130: Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
Page 131 and 132: We were eating breakfast in the din
Page 133 and 134: "That must have been it," I said. I
Page 135 and 136: some kind of big pain, and it start
Page 137 and 138: the two piles of hay, with the extr
Page 139 and 140: I must refuse. The reason I have to
Page 141 and 142: hotel. I pushed open the doors and
Page 143 and 144: "Well, yes. . ." "Hoompf." And that
Page 145 and 146: something like, "May I observe your
Page 147 and 148: in fact, a prediction on top of wha
Page 149 and 150: "The one from SoandSo's book."
Page 151 and 152: government, or else I can't talk in
Page 153 and 154: et Jerry that he wouldn't be able t
Page 155 and 156: at the paper. Don't take your eyes
Page 157: She told me this story: She and her
Page 161 and 162: they came back and bought it. So th
Page 163 and 164: with the artists from time to time
Page 165 and 166: understand," and everybody else wou
Page 167 and 168: way to understand ethical problems
Page 169 and 170: families all the time, so that if a
Page 171 and 172: that they called "new math," and si
Page 173 and 174: awful! All it was was a game to get
Page 175 and 176: then there was something else. And
Page 177 and 178: one. Then the question came up, "Wi
Page 179 and 180: I got that shock about three or fou
Page 181 and 182: had been brought up by my father ag
Page 183 and 184: She turned to me and said, "Oh! You
Page 185 and 186: astronomy. *When I was a young prof
Page 187 and 188: After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
Page 189 and 190: So the fella who'd been talking to
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Page 193 and 194: who had come out at the beginning o
Page 195 and 196: "This is the place," the receptioni
Page 197 and 198: my way down again. At first it took
Page 199 and 200: external to the internal psychologi
Page 201 and 202: people with commonsense ideas are i
Page 203 and 204: think to laymen. For example, I was
Page 205: to have such a policy in teaching
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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