Probably the most important thing I did, if I were to cite one incident — and this has nothing to do with paleontology in a direct sense, but in another way it has everything to do with career — was singing in the All-City High School Chorus. I was always interested in choral singing, in fact I still sing. It was a total fluke. In fact, the chorus teacher made a mistake. There was this chorus which was composed of the best singers from all the high schools, and each public high school was allocated a few audition try-out passes, so to speak. My chorus director had two. I was in the junior chorus, the senior chorus had more. And he called my name by mistake — there was one obvious person who got one of the tickets — and I was very pleased. I went up to get the ticket and he suddenly realized he’d made a mistake, but being a sensitive man — I’ve always been grateful for this — he didn’t embarrass me by saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you.” He just let it happen, he gave me the ticket. I went down, I tried out, I actually got in. I was by no means in the top half of this chorus, but the chorus was then led by a man named Peter Wilhousky, who was director of music for the City of New York, one of the great choral conductors of America. He was an old Polish or Russian aristocrat, and he just had a fierce belief in excellence. He was also tough as could be, and he’d throw people out at a moment’s notice. He’s not a nice man, I don’t mean that. Niceness is not always what you want. I mean, you need a lot of it, but before I met Wilhousky I had just never even encountered the notion that genuine professional excellence was attainable by high school students. And yet he would settle for nothing else. We were the best singers in the high school system in the city, and we were damned well going to turn out a professional quality concert, which we gave each year in Carnegie Hall. He wasn’t even going to consider anything else, he just didn’t even talk about it. You were going to do that, and I’m going to do it all, that’s all there was to it. And that was a very inspirational message. I don’t know that my life would have been different. I think I had enough internal drive to do what I wanted to do, but to see that institutionalization of genuine excellence at age 15, 16, was very important to me. Now I got into that chorus by sheer good fortune, as I’ve told you the story. That’s how lives work anyway.