In the meantime . . .

I've been going through a lot of old drawings lately, thinking about the journey and the stops along the way. It didn't start as a trip down memory lane, but you can't go through seven years of work and not stir up a healthy dose of "Know Thyself."

Hirschfeld once said to me that when he looked at his old drawings he sometimes wondered why anyone ever bothered to publish them. Of course, he was almost 100 years old when he said this and for all I know the drawings he was talking about were, well, The Marx Brothers posters he created or the original poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

When I look at my drawings from when I first moved to New York--you know, the ones that I was making and thinking "I should move to New York and be a succesful artist"--I have a hard time understanding where I got the nerve. It's like the old chestnut where someone's flying along and then they're told that they can't fly because they're not a bird, so they fall. That was me, but no one ever told me I couldn't fly. And I don't suppose I would have listened to them if they had, because it really felt like flying at the time.