During that run, Nichols met Edward Albee, and they had dinner together one night before curtain. It makes sense that they would find each other. They were close to the same age; both were considered intellectually fashionable and outré. The Zoo Story had opened off-Broadway that January. Albee had already seen An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May once and offered suggestions about several scenes—notes that Nichols respected but did not honor. He later reflected that he did not think either of them was influenced by the other, yet, from the first, he sensed a certain empathy with Albee: Both of them had “outsider feelings.” For Nichols, those feelings could be traced back to his childhood as a German immigrant (born Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky) who arrived in America at age seven now speaking a word of English. On top of that, when he was four, an allergic reaction to medication brough about a lifetime alopecia-like affliction, which left him unable to grow hair. Nichols wore wigs his entire life. Meanwhile, Albee, as an adopted child, felt like an immigrant in his own family. He and Nichols shared a sense of alienation and unhappiness about their respective student years at boarding schools. While Nichols found Albee austere and socially restrained, “I felt a real connection to him and almost an affection obviously because of his mind and his work, but also because of his wry cordiality.”
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