"
Frigideira
."
"OK. Let me hear you play the
frigideira
."
So
this guy picked up his
frigideira
and his metal stick and . . . "
brrra-dup-dup; chick-a-chick
." Gee whiz! It was wonderful!
The boss said to him, "You go over there and stand next to
O Americano
, and you'll learn how to play the
frigideira!
"
My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly
understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you fin d there's a delightful twist to their
way of speaking--their
accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it. So I must have had some sort of accent playing the
frigideira
, because I couldn't compete with those
guys who had been playing it all their lives; it must have been some kind of dumb accent. But whatever it was, I became a rather successful
frigideira
player.
One day, shortly before Carnaval time, the leader of the samba school said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street."
We all went out from the construction
site to the street, and it was full of traffic. The streets of Copacabana were always a big mess. Believe it or
not, there was a trolley line in which the trolley cars went one way, and the automobiles went the other way. Here it was rush hour in Copacabana,
and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
I said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to go
out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited. Some volunteers from a group of
bystanders took a rope and
formed a big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through our lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody
wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started
diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it worked fine. The people were
holding the ropes around us, the
policeman was diverting the traffic, the pedestrians were crowded and the traffic was jammed, but we were going along great! We walked down the
street, around the corners, and all over the damn Copacabana, at
random
!
Finally we ended up in a little square in front of the apartment where the boss's mother lived. We stood there in this place, playing, and the guy's
mother, and aunt, and so on, came down. They had aprons on; they had
been working in the kitchen, and you could see their excitement--they were
almost crying. It was really nice to do that human stuff. And all the people leaning out of the windows--that was terrific! And I remembered the time
I had been in Brazil before, and had seen one of these samba bands--how I loved the music and nearly went crazy over it --and now I was
in
it!
By the way, when we were marching around the streets of Copacabana that day, I saw in a group on the sidewalk two young ladies from the
embassy. Next week I got a note from the embassy saying, "It's a great thing you are doing, yak, yak, yak . . ." as if
my purpose was to improve
relations between the United States and Brazil! So it was a "great" thing I was doing.
Well, in order to go to these rehearsals, I didn't want to go dressed in my regular clothes that I wore to the university. The people in the band
were very poor, and had only old, tattered clothes. So I put on an old undershirt, some old pants, and so forth, so I wouldn't look too peculiar. But
then I couldn't walk out of my luxury hotel on Avenida Atlantica in Copacabana Beach through the lobby. So I always took the elevator down to the
bottom and went out through the basement.
A
short time before Carnaval, there was going to be a special competition between the samba schools of the beaches-- Copacabana, Ipanema, and
Leblon; there were three or four schools, and we were one. We were going to march in costume down Avenida Atlantica. I felt a little uncomfortable
about marching in one of those fancy Carnaval costumes, since I wasn't a Brazilian. But we were supposed to be dressed as Greeks, so I figured I'm
as good a Greek as they are.
On the day of the competition, I was eating at the hotel restaurant, and the head waiter, who had often seen me tapping
on the table when there
was samba music playing, came over to me and said, "Mr. Feynman, this evening there's going to be something you will love!
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
