So, I used to go to the Museum of Natural History, because they had the most amazing collection of stuffed birds. ((Certain Aesthetic)) They had this unbelievable collection of birds. And I just adored — I mean I was just a kid, but just trying to identify — and I made a kind of business of trying to learn the differences of all these birds. And for a while, I wasn’t too bad, although it was just the kids’ way of doing it. And I think that was also connected, of course, to my fantasies about flight.

All these things seemed to have had the same source in some way. I think that I woke up regularly with a sense that I had been flying somewhere. And I think that’s not an unusual fantasy, but I’ve always admired birds that way, and the great predator birds are just among my special favorites. They are absolutely fantastic.

So, when I was a kid, it was at the time of space cartoons. Flash Gordon, for example, and the Hawkman, I always — the idea that there were Hawkmen or could be. That seemed to me to be just exactly the kind of thing that I would have wanted to be. The Hawkman, something like that.