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

ang, bang at full speed, while he was looking at the music! What a shock that was to
me. I had worked for four days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it
right out!
Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and played it in
the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see the professor on stage
playing the bongos, and the music wasn't so bad; but that part at the beginning, that had
to be the same: that was hard.
In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort of dance
that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife of one of the guys at
Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time for Universal Studios, to teach
the boys how to dance. She liked our drumming, and when the shows were over, she
asked us if we would like to drum in San Francisco for a ballet.
"WHAT?"
Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a
small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was
nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she
moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a
story that went with the rhythms.
Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this
adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of
physics, Nobel­Prize­winner, or any other baloney. I didn't want to do the drumming if I
was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs,
it's not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn't want to do it if I was a
physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los
Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.
So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out.
She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her
mind and said, "OK, I want fifty­two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of
this, that, this, that. . ."
We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph's house. We played
all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his
tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a copy of our tape with her when
she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.
Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty­two cycles of this,
forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we
now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!
The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that
because he's a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The "playing
department" in our minds was also the "talking department" for counting ­­ we couldn't
play and count at the same time!
When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by
watching the dancers we didn't have to count because the dancers went through certain
motions.
There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to
be professional musicians and I wasn't. For example, one of the scenes was about a
beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies,