This was originally published in my Substack exactly three years ago. I can’t remember whether I published it here or not, but even if i did, you probably haven’t read it. I am currently writing Issue 4 of my comic Wild Atlantic Ink, and I keep being hit with unavoidable tasks, so if you are a subscriber I am sorry to say it might be a bit late.
The title is a reference to Richard Feyman’s book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! Here we go.
Physics and Mr Feynman
There’s a physicist, or was, named Richard Feynman. Physicists like my husband know of him. I am not a physicist but I dabbled in the subject in university and loved it, and when Feynman’s memoir was the Audible Daily Deal a couple of years ago, and had glowing reviews, and a huge listening-hour count, I thought it might be just the job. I expected some physics, but Feynman takes it very easy on the reader in that respect, and it’s mostly a memoir of his life, and what he had learned about human behaviour.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! lay somewhere in the cloud or on my phone – who knows which – until a week or two ago. I only picked it up because everything else was boring me, and it was there. Maybe it’s because the Oppenheimer movie is out at the moment that my subconscious mind was thinking about nuclear physics in the 1940s – the two men were contemporaries, and worked together – but I am glad I went back to the book.
Are you sitting comfortably?
I am going to tell you a story from the book, which ties in with a story of my own, similar and yet very different.
Feynman picked up a hitchhiker who was from South America one day. The hitchhiker said Feynman should visit South America. Feynman realised, resentfully, that he would have to learn the language if he were to go, and chose Spanish over Portuguese. Then, just as he was about to start the class, he saw a beautiful girl walk into the Portuguese class, and changed his mind. Then he thought that was a stupid reason to choose a language, and went back to the Spanish class. He came to regret this choice, as he worked in Brazil for a period of six weeks to lecture in a university there, then returned for a ten month period the following year. He “adapted” the Spanish he knew to Portuguese and muddled along okay.
Mr Feynman stayed in the Miramar Hotel on Copacabana Beach. He loved the sound of samba, in particular that of a type of tambourine, and joined a samba school. Carnival was coming, and the band practiced every day. Feynman was terrible at first and kept getting giving out to by the band leader (been there. The nerve). But he practiced like mad, and one day he was singled out and told to go to the front. He figured the band leader just couldn’t put up with him any more. Then a trumpeter, a drummer and a few others followed. Six of them were sent out to the street in front and told to get into a convertible. He said there wasn’t room for them all so a couple perched on the back (it’s the early 1950s, it’s a beach in Rio, paint a picture in your mind). They were driven to a cliff, where the car stopped, and they were told to walk to the edge. (Yes, I was thinking the same thing – were they THAT bad?) Turns out there was a steep, narrow path that the band were to walk down, playing their instruments, to a private party on the beach. Feynman mustn’t have been too bad after all.
Competition night arrived. Feynman and his bandmates were to take part. They were to dress up as Ancient Greeks and perform: Feynman suffered from impostor syndrome, but figured he was as Greek as any of the others that night. During lunch in the hotel that day, the head waiter approached Mr Feynman.
“There is a Brazilian specialty happening here this evening,” he said. “Special brasileiro! You mustn’t miss it!”
“I’m afraid I don’t think I can make it,” said Feynman. “I’m doing something else.”
“You must!” insisted the waiter. “It’s music, special brasileiro!”
Alas, Feynman couldn’t do both. Off he went that evening in his rough civvies (he didn’t like to wear his fancy American suit in front of the others, who were poor) and changed into Ancient Greek robes, and lots of papier maché, with his fellow performers. They played the streets of Rio and fetched up outside the Miramar. Suddenly there was a cry from the spectators and a man stood up. It was the head waiter.
“O americano!” he cried, delighted. The American!
Feyman’s group won the competition.
That was in the 1950s. In the 1980s, I lived in London. Then I left, and returned for a visit in the early 1990s, just a couple of weeks before I began university (and physics, as it happens). While I was there, my Irish friend Caroline happened to be there too. We had been very close when I lived in Paris the previous year. We met when I rented the flat she was vacating: there were 147 messages on her answering machine the day she advertised it, but mine was the first. When we spoke on the phone, in French, there was a pause during our exchange, when one of us said in awkward French, “sorry, but are you Irish?” and the other said, “yeah, are you?’ That was the beginning of a deep friendship.
Caroline was obsessed with all things Brazilian. The music, the language, the food, the men, the country: she worked in IT as an analyst and spent every free hour doing Brazilian things, and spent her wages on trips to Brazil. She showed me a photo she had taken of a toucan. She would tell me words in Brazilian and say “isn’t that beautiful?” I think she’s married to a Brazilian now. She was doing a stint in London for some reason, and the Notting Hill Carnival was happening that week. Caroline was, of course, taking part, playing the same little tambourine that Feynman played (you’ve heard it, it’s the one that makes a ferocious rattling knock). She said I should come down and see her getting ready for the parade, so I did.
Be careful what you wish for
I entered a huge room in Shepherd’s Bush, a gym or something. It was packed to the rafters with people of all shapes, sizes and hues sheathed in swathes of emerald green sequined fabric, with white diaphanous fabric forming the base layers. Feathers were everywhere. The room glittered, and the din would deafen you, as everyone whacked their loud rattling tambourines and deep, booming drums. I enjoyed it all, the atmosphere, the excitement…and then I made my fatal mistake.
“I’m jealous,” I said to Caroline.
“So join us,” said Caroline. “See that gorgeous lady over there? Tell her you want to join in.”
Without thinking too much, I edged my way through the crowds of people getting ready for the parade, and found the gorgeous lady. She was as cute as a button, with a tight little body (I know I am not supposed to say that but there you have it) and was perfect everywhere. She was a coppery colour and very beautiful, with her hair in a ponytail. She was also extremely hassled, organising and overseeing the preparations of a hundred and more performers. She grabbed me.
“Where’s your costume!” she barked.
“Um…I don’t have one? My friend Caroline said I should talk to you…”
I think there must be some kind of rule in Brazil that anyone who wants to join in Carnival cannot be refused, because she disappeared and returned with a sort of swimsuit-leotard thing. After that the memory becomes painful, but my aim is to entertain you, so here goes.
The swimsuit was a kind of whitish-silver. It would have looked great on the beauty who gave it to me, but it did not look great on me. The suit was high-cut, a style which didn’t suit my fat thighs, which weren’t fat in a good way. I was wearing black underpants which weren’t high-cut, so they sat below the leg line. They were visible through the swimsuit thing. I had no tights and had not shaved my legs, so they were spiky. I had no suntan, having left Paris a month earlier, and you can’t hang out by the pool or the sea in Paris, the only way I like to be in warm sunshine. So my legs were whitish-purple and blotchy. And spiky. The swimsuit had a row of long silver tassels sewn around the bust line. I only had runners, which were white – once. The other girls had swanky high heels. A feathered headdress was produced. The feathers were green, white and orange, a colour combination I never wear as it makes me look like an advertisement for Tourism Ireland with my red hair, but a bad one, from the 1970s. My face was pink. The headdress went up above my head a great distance. I had to make a phone call and someone must have taken a photo of me with the black payphone in my hand, and it was a candid photo, so I forgot to suck in my tummy…that photo will remain seared on my brain forever. (And I was only 23, so it’s been a long forever.)
The parade began. I knew I had made a terrible mistake, and there was no getting out of it now. But things can always get worse, and I was sent to the front row. The front line, if you will. There were only three of us in the front, and our role was to dance our way along the streets. I had never danced samba before. I was in the middle. Two beautiful girls took the right and left.
The girl on my left was just as beautiful as the costume lady.
“What move is that you’re doing?” she asked as I did the Irish woman version of a samba dance – for those who haven’t seen that dance, it involves lots of little sideways steps in one direction thus and then lots of sideways steps in the other direction thus, done prettily and femininely.
“I don’t know,” I said with a nervous laugh. “I only joined up about ten minutes ago.”
The girl was horrified, and I realised that I had disrespected the whole parade by being there, after she and all her fellow performers had practiced and worked so hard for so many months. I think Caroline had thought I would be shoved in towards the back with her, rattling a loud tiny tambourine, unnoticed, and not given front-row status.
I felt terrible. I couldn’t dance. I didn’t know the moves. I wasn’t pretty. The girls to my left and right sashayed and samba-ed aloing the streets of London. Shepherd’s Bush. Ladbroke Grove. Notting Hill. Behind us an enormous float drove slowly along, and then the hundred and more dancers and percussionists, Caroline amongst them. The float was decorated to the nth degree and on the top there was a giant clam shell. In the centre of the giant clam shell was perched the beautiful costume-dressing lady who had put me in the unsuitable swimsuit. She was even more glorious now, in full goddess mode, dressed in silver, two silver clams on her boobs, silver against her dark copper skin, enormous silver feathered headdress, a beatific smile full of shiny white teeth, a beatific wave to the gasping, admiring crowd…I only hope she didn’t look down.
An hour went by. I was starting to get that pain in the hips and legs that you get from twisting when you’re not actually feeling the music. I wondered if I could escape. Just run. In my runners. But in 1991 a woman in a swimsuit running through the streets of London, even on Carnival day, was notable. I didn’t have the nerve. It would be like one of those dreams where you’re running through the streets naked, or almost. I think the spiky legs and the black pants were a large part of my reluctance to draw attention by running anywhere.
Seven hours went by. Seven hours of twisting and feeling like a fraud. It was humid and close, and I was getting pinker. The girl to my left had long since stopped talking to me, although she occasionally still glowered in my direction. The girl on my right never acknowledged me at all, which was marginally better.
I sashayed along, through the crowds lining the streets. I sashayed past a young blond man in a grey t-shirt, smiling gormlessly at the passing samba and reggae acts. He saw me, did a double take and his jaw fell open.
“You!” he said.
He was a busboy from the restaurant in Paris where I had recently been working as a waitress – a young British guy, a nice lad. He was always polite and self-effacing. I don’t think he expected to see this troublemaking Irishwoman in this particular role, here, today. All I could do was laugh nervously and shrug as if to say “I know! What can you do?”
Eight hours passed. It ended. I was released from my sentence. I don’t remember the end. I can see Caroline looking at me with a bewildered expression, if I try hard. In my mind’s eye, she is covered in emerald green sequined fabric, and is holding a little rattly tambourine. She is smiling at me, but it’s a frozen smile. The next day, and the next, my feet were so tired and sore I thought I would never recover.
So there are two things I have in common with Mr Feynman: we both took part in a samba carnival, and we both studied physics.
But unlike Mr Feynman, if there had been a cliff the band leaders could have marched me to, they would happily have dispensed with the path.
Epilogue
I must have nurtured a soft spot for this experience, somewhere in the most contrary part of my psyche, as I joined a local samba band some eight years ago. I was such a natural on the drums. The band leader must have been tone-deaf as he thought I was out of step with my loud rattling. I could show him a thing or two about being out of step, Oh yes.
