<a href="http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/just-drawn-that-way/">I re-read this piece from the New York Times</a> whenever

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<blockquote>Soon after settling on the Upper East Side, I came upon the Fifth Avenue book fair and impulse-bought a copy of “<a href="http://www.playbillstore.com/hionli.html">Hirschfeld On Line</a>” — a wonderful collection of Al Hirschfeld’s theater drawings. The next morning, I flipped open the book for the first time to find not a drawing, but a photograph of Hirschfeld sitting in a theater seat, sketching.

An hour after seeing that photograph, I was at a diner with an acquaintance, who asked me, “What are you going to do now that you live in New York?”

“I’ve been thinking of sitting in theater rehearsals and drawing,” I replied.

This response was not considered and the process of thinking about it lasted as long as the train ride from 86th Street to Bleecker Street, but the man to whom I was talking, David Fuller, had just become head of the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater and he suggested I try it with a production of Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters” they were to begin rehearsing the next week.</blockquote>