Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

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?" 
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, NobelPrize-winner, 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 fifty-two 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: fifty-two 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, who had come out at the beginning of 
the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made 
rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat 
opposite each other on chairs and put this "crazy drum" between us on our knees, with one guy beating