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

I chose to play a thing called a “frigideira,” which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. It’s an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when all of a sudden the head of the batteria section, a great big black man, yelled out, “STOP! Hold it, hold it—wait a minute!” And everybody stopped. “Something’s wrong with the frigideiras!” he boomed out. “0 Americano, outra vez! ” (“The American again!”)

So I felt uncomfortable. I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.

Well, it was getting closer to Carnaval time, and one evening there was a conversation between the leader of the band and another guy, and then the leader started coming around, picking people out: “You!” he said to a trumpeter. “You!” he said to a singer. “You!”—and he pointed to me. I figured we were finished. He said, “Go out in front!”

We went out to the front of the construction site—the five or six of us—and there was an old Cadillac convertible, with its top down. “Get in!” the leader said.

There wasn’t enough room for us all, so some of us had to sit up on the back. I said to the guy next to me, “What’s he doing—is he putting us out?”

“Nao sй, nгo sй.” (“I don’t know.”)

We drove off way up high on a road which ended near the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The car stopped and the leader said, “Get out!”—and they walked us right up to the edge of the cliff!

And sure enough, he said, “Now line up! You first, you next, you next! Start playing! Now march!”

We would have marched off the edge of the cliff—except for a steep trail that went down. So our little group goes down the trail—the trumpet, the singer, the guitar, the pandeiro, and the frigideira–to an outdoor party in the woods. We weren’t picked out because the leader wanted to get rid of us; he was sending us to this private party that wanted some samba music! And afterwards he collected money to pay for some costumes for our band.

After that I felt a little better, because I realized that when he picked the frigideira player, he picked me!

Another thing happened to increase my confidence. Some time later, a guy came from another samba school, in Leblon, a beach further on. He wanted to join our school.

The boss said, “Where’re you from?”

“Leblon.”

“What do you play?”

“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 find 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!