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

The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following
spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms,
and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at
Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma
GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there,
we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to make elephant tusks that
looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mache were so bad that
some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.
We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when
the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner
Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I
was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to
explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.
"What's the matter?" he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "Tusks!" Behind him, on the floor, were these
enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the
dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet
there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all
over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she
entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the
world. She brought a high­quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some
dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet ­­ that's how she entered the
contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left ­­ a
Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful
classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had
trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity contest, and the
judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out
the weakness in her ballet.
"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough.
Controlled crescendoes were missing. . ."
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people
in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
Altered States
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company,
and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the
receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in ­­ a man, a woman, and a
few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, "Is this where Professor
Feynman is giving some lectures?"