Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his memoirs about learning pick up back in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s (I’m going from memory here, so bear with me if I’ve got some of the facts a bit garbled). This was at the time in Feynman’s life when his first wife had passed away, and he was working out at Los Alamos. He happened to be staying at a motel that had it’s own lounge. He met a girl there and started buying her drinks in the hopes of possibly getting lucky. She played him pretty good since she happened to be married to the musician playing in the lounge. The couple decided to take young Dr. Feynman under their wing and teach him the rudimentary skills of getting a gal into his bed.
They told him a very simple rule: Never buy a woman anything until AFTER she has agreed to go to bed with you.
Feynman goes on to describe the first gal he tries to pick up using his new rule of never buying a woman anything until after she’d agreed to sleep with him. Everything is going on fine, she invites him back to her room, and then asks him to buy a couple of sandwiches and bring them to the room. He eagerly does as she’s asked him only to find when he shows up that she’s now turned cold on the whole idea of the two of them getting together. She kicks him out with an excuse. Feynman realizes his mistake, goes back to her room and demands she give the sandwiches back. The woman is a bit taken aback by it all, but hands him back the sandwiches. Eventually he tells her she can have a sandwich, but only if she agrees to sleep with him, which she does.
A few years later, Feynman is back at Princeton. He admits to having a limiting belief regarding the golden rule. He knows that refusing to buy anything for a woman is the proper way to pick up women in bars and lounges, but what about the co-ed’s? These are women from fine families, not some bar floozy. At a faculty/student mixer he meets the younger sister of one of his colleagues. They hit it off, venue change, and she asks Feynman to buy her something to eat. As he tells it, he looked at the gal and told her he would buy it for her only if she would sleep with him that night. She agreed.
Now, judging by the picture above, Dr. Feynman wasn’t a bad looking guy. By all accounts he was a mischievous sort of scoundrel. As he tells it, he came up with his Nobel prize winning idea while sitting in a stripper bar. He also admitted in his memoirs to using marijuana and ketamine, but not LSD which he also purportedly tried. Essentially, Feynman never lost his sense of adventure or his curiosity about the world around him. Reading his memoirs I got the sense of how entertaining it would have been to be around the guy.
