Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feinman.
Comment from E-mail
Hello,
Ummm… I have no idea if you’ll even read this, but here goes.
Thankyou *so* much for putting time into woz.org, through which I’ve been wading for the last couple of hours, reading the comments and so on. I’ve read other things about you through other sources but few actually made me as happy as your own site.
That’s my prize comment of the day and it truly makes my day. My site was floundering and not kept up for years. All it had was the WozCam. I’ve sacrificed a lot to spend so much time answering so many questions. It’s kind of like the performer that actually takes the time to do that sort of thing. You remember it in a good way. A similar story was when I saw Barry Manilow, whose music I don’t even love or really care for. He was so respectful to the audience that it showed and he became sort of a hero of my own. At one point he brought a random stranger on-stage to sing a sing with him. He even wrapped his arms around her as they sang. At the end of the song, a helper ran out from the side and actually presented the audience member with a VHS tape of it. How thoughtful! I’ve seen many performers bring audience members on stage but never saw another hand them a tape.
It is so good to be able to hear what you have to say about things rather than having it painted by someone else’s brush (I remember hearing somewhere that you don’t read books on Apple because they have a tendency to stuff up some of the details), and the sheer amount of replies you’ve written practically answers all the questions I would have asked you anyway. Thankyou. And again: thankyou. A round of applause. I’m looking forward to your autobiography, if you ever get round to it.
Woz
Well, that relieves me of as much email, I hope. But if some big thing happens, like another “Pirates” movie, I’m sure that I’d have to miss answering most email due to lack of time.
Very little of the stuff on my website gets close to the heart of my autobiography, which has been postponed for years despite interest and contracts from publishers. It’s similar to “Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feinman.” Apple and things like that are only in the background of a very entertaining and interesting story. I know that I want to write it myself. Some tries with ghost writers failed because I didn’t want to contribute much time and I knew that I’d not likely be satisfied with the results anyway. Without putting in a lot of effort on my own, they never even got me samples of what they might write.