Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans. (“I couldn’t move,” Rebecca Klassen, the museum’s curator of material culture, told me afterward.)

“Packed” is an unusual state for a historical society. But people were eager to look, in person, at photos they most likely had already seen online: Flaco flying, Flaco preening, Flaco peering in a window, Flaco sitting on a pitcher’s mound. An older woman with a cane stood in front of a photo of Flaco avoiding recapture and chuckled to herself, then said quietly, “Marvelous.”

“The Year of Flaco” features videos and photographs of the beloved bird, as well as dozens of trinkets and letters that were left at a memorial for Flaco at the base of an oak tree in Central Park last March. Those items were collected and stored by a group of Flaco fans, who over the summer presented Klassen with the idea for the exhibition. Klassen was convinced by their sincerity and their presentation about Flaco’s significance to the city. She told The New York Times, “He was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people,” which I thought was fantastic reasoning.

The exhibition takes up half of a long, narrow space that could more accurately be called “a hallway.” But it tells Flaco’s story in satisfying detail. Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo when an unknown vandal cut open the mesh of his enclosure. Though zoo employees initially made several attempts to recapture Flaco, mostly out of concern for his ability to care for himself in the “wild” (New York City), they gave up because he was evading them so well and because he started hunting and seemed to be enjoying his exciting new life. He mostly roamed Central Park, but in the fall of 2023, he took a few trips downtown. One day he was photographed sitting on the fire escape of a building on the Upper West Side. At the exhibition, this image—-and the idea of such an encounter—nearly brought me to tears. Imagine if that had happened to you! (Imagine if that had happened to me!) The luck of some people.

You may think this feeling is out of proportion, and you may not be wrong, but I am not alone. Flaco was the pride of the city for a season—or four—and Michiko Kakutani, the legendary and technically retired Times book critic, came back to write not one but two reported stories about him. He was somehow petite and precious (weighing only a few pounds) but also huge and terrifying (wingspan of about six feet). Just after he escaped, my colleague Matteo Wong used the words of Walt Whitman to describe him: “well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.” It’s true: His irises were a gorgeous shade of chrysanthemum orange. His talons looked like they could maim a medium-size dog. In letters displayed at the New York Historical, fans are startlingly—and even unsettlingly—vulnerable. They express attachment to Flaco that goes into the realm of the feelings they might have for their own actual pet, or for a person (one thanks Flaco for inspiring the writer to apply to law school). Others are short and sweet: “Fly high, Flaco”; “Freedom and peace our beautiful hero.” There is one acrostic poem: “Fabulous / Liberated / Awesome / Captivating / Owl.”

[Read: Is “instinct” really keeping Flaco the owl alive?]

After Klassen asked visitors if they had any Flaco stories to share, a woman in a cream turtleneck told me and the other onlookers that she’d gotten a Flaco tattoo on her back that she couldn’t show—because of the turtleneck—and that it was a cityscape done by an artist who has painted murals of Flaco. The woman shared that she’d seen Flaco herself on seven or eight occasions while running in the park. Sometimes, a crowd was around him already. If one wasn’t, she would keep his secret. “I would see him and I would wink,” she said.

Flaco was perpetually hounded by paparazzi (regular people with iPhones), and his apparent ease in that situation was what made him such a good celebrity. Many random animals do become symbols and social-media stars. When they die, we mourn them, but they also trigger our imagination (“I think for a lot of people, he symbolized that all things are possible,” the actor Alan Ruck said about Los Angeles’s favorite mountain lion, P-22, five months after he was hit by a car.) Think of the tragic story of Harambe the gorilla, which challenged the premise of zoos and then became a distasteful meme. Think of the white-tailed deer in Harlem that was labeled a Christmas reindeer just because he happened to appear in December. His death—though it actually had nothing to do with our lives—was read as poetic because it came at the end of 2016, when many New Yorkers were already quite emotional and glum due to the first election of President Donald Trump.

[Read: Tracking the mountain lion that ate a Chihuahua]

And though we like any animal with a story, we like escaped animals best. When some poor beast escapes from whatever zoo or circus or (sorry) slaughterhouse we put them in, we love to see it. We want them to get out. We want them to live like us. This is projection to an understandable but somewhat morbid degree. Many Flaco fans, including my co-worker Matteo, described Flaco as a New Yorker while he was alive, but of course, Flaco didn’t know what New York was or that he lived there. Others said he was an immigrant, though this is not true—his is a non-native species, but he was born in North Carolina. They said he was proving that everyone longs for freedom and the American dream, but he didn’t know about rights and probably didn’t even know about longing. They said he was gritty, but I honestly don’t know what that means when you’re talking about a bird.

Now that he is dead, we are thrusting martyrdom onto him. I think we love Flaco still, after all this time, because he lived on our toxic planet and in our wretched (wonderful) city that is so inhospitable to life, and he did it with dignity, grace, and humor until he couldn’t—until he lost all control of his faculties and died alone.

Also because he was such a beautiful, beautiful bird.

Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Gilda Radner jokes with a person in a King Kong costume at a party on the observatory floor of the Empire State Building in New York City on August 13, 1980. (AP)

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder in 1982 (Adam Scull / MediaPunch / AP)

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.