Lisa Birnbach’s guest this week, Journalist Mark Harris, met the director Mike Nichols when he directed "Angels in America", the iconic play written by Harris' husband, Tony Kushner, for HBO. The Broadway and film director of "Barefoot in the Park," "The Graduate", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "Carnal Knowledge", "Heartburn," "The Real Thing" and many others befriended the couple along the way, a friendship which endured until Nichols' death in 2014.  The biography is exhaustive and filled with personal anecdotes and informative insights-- beyond Nichols and his body of work but also the life of the creative class from the 1950s through the present.

Lisa Birnbach’s 5 Things that make her life better: 1. Our dog breeders, April and Sue, 2. Our dog trainer, Sam Schmidt, 3. Bulgarian Feta, 4. Dolly Parton, 5. The movie, “The Graduate”.

The 5 Things that make life better for Mark Harris: 1. The Library of America, 2. The Criterion Channel, 3. Sheet-pan cooking, 4. Headspace (meditation website), 5. My Blu-ray player.

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