“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock-type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment—you can’t screw it up) I really got hot.

After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the band leader said, “Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell! He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for–you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was!”

Anyhow, at Caltech there’s a group that puts on plays. Some of the actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there’s a small part, such as a policeman who’s supposed to arrest somebody, they get one of the professors to do it. It’s always a big joke-the professor comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.

A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they’re in a nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo player on the stage in the nightclub be me.

I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed to the orchestra conductor and said, “Jack will show you the music.”

Well, that petrified me. I don’t know how to read music; I thought all I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.

Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said, “OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk, plonk ”—he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. “Then you play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here”—and he turned some more pages and said, “Finally, you play this.”

He showed me this “music” that was written in some kind of crazy pattern of little x’s in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to remember any of it.

Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn’t come to the next rehearsal, I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he’s a musician, he should know what it’s all about. Ralph came back and said, “It’s not so bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right because you’re starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it’s a matter of ad-libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but I think we’ll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra conductor gives.”

In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the two of us would be on the stage. He’d play the tumba and I’d play the bongos—so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.

So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I’d never had to play anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would patiently explain, “left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then right.

I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time-many days—to get it.

A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer there-the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else—and we introduced ourselves to him:

“Hi. We’re the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene.”

“Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here …” and he turned to the page where our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, “Oh, you start off the scene with …” and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing, bong, ban g-a-bang, bing-a-bing, bang, 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?”