#Grace Melville

[sixaltfan]

Calling all Six fans, which alt queens 2nd/3rd covers roles would you assign them as a lead. Here are your queen, choose Six queens and one of their 2nd/3rd covers and make a little Dreamcast reblog this and show me what dream cast with alts 2nd/3rd covers you would assign as a lead.

Natalie: 2nd: Cleves/Howard 3rd: Aragon/Boleyn

Leesa: 2nd: Aragon/Seymour 3rd: Cleves/Parr

Grace: 2nd:Boleyn/Parr

Izi: 2nd: Seymour/Cleves 3rd: Parr

Ellie: 2nd:Boleyn/Parr 3rd:Howard

Tamara: 2nd: Aragon/Howard

Danielle: 2nd: Aragon/Seymour 3rd: Cleves/Parr

Monique: 2nd:Boleyn/Parr 3rd: Seymour/Howard

Leah: 2nd: Cleves/Howard 3rd: Aragon/Boleyn

[six-costume-refs]

Why did Grace Melville have the extra hair at the bottom for her Parr hairstyle, when Leesa didn't? It can't be her natural hair, Grace's hair wasn't *that* long.

It was Grace's Howard wig! They've done the same thing for a number of other swalts:

Rachel Rawlinson, Harriet Caplan-Dean, Grace Melville (rachelrawlinson, harrietdeany, l.eesa) They usually try to make two or three wigs for each swalt and reuse each for a few different roles. Howard ponytails are (relatively) quick and easy, so it's been standard for a long time now that every UK swalt gets one. The back ponytail has been a common enough Parr style for a while (in various configurations) and the guaranteed Howard ponytail adds some movement and volume to it, so it's a good fit. (Note: Collette Guitart isn’t included in this post but she also had some similar styles) Leesa Tulley didn't have that because her Howard is of course hot pink, haha. She did eventually get a ponytail though:

(all l.eesa)

Left is her Parr debut, where she wore a similar hairstyle to her Cleves. Both center and right are from later shows, where they switched her over to a loose ponytail. I’m not sure if it’s her hair or her Seymour back piece; they've used full wigs/backpiece similarly for other swalts like Danielle Rose (who of course also doesn't have a neutral Howard pony) and Esme Rothero/Harriet Watson who both have full wigs restyled for every role.

[sixthemusicalextras]

Jack Marian on YouTube, 23 April 2023

Farewell, queens!

[unwrittenemmy]

Day two hundred and eighty five of posting every six queen

Grace Melville as Catherine Parr

[six-another-timeline]

Grace Melville E/C Aragon tonight!

they rlly said 2022-23 uk tour on the west end rights huh

[glidingsilvery]

Grâce à Dieu premiere

(Ciné Mourguet)

[willstafford]

Straight Shooting

COWBOIS The Swan, Royal Shakespeare Company, Friday 3rd November 2023 This exuberant new piece by Charlie Josephine (who co-directs with Sean Holmes) is a Wild West yarn about a backwater town where the menfolk have all buggered off because of the Gold Rush and haven’t been heard from since, leaving the women and children to fend for themselves.  The women adapt to survive, performing…

[cat-webp]

wedding cake cookie npt

💍 ꒱ names

ㅤaden, albert, alonso, ambrose, archie, baker, basil, baxter, casimir, cecil, coleman, cosmo, daniel, fraser, gabriel, godfrey, harvey, jasper, kellen, kipling, lance, linwood, lucian, melville, oliver, piers, selwyn, shane, shawn, silas, soren, sterling, stetson, sylvester, thomas, vincent, wolfe

ㅤabbey, adelaide, alanis, alice, amelia, amora, angelica, annabelle, azalea, beatrice, belle, beryl, birdie, blanche, cadence, caitlyn, carmen, carrie, cecelia, chanel, charlotte, claribel, dahlia, dottie, edith, elaine, elora, erin, evangelina, faithe, felicity, fern, gardenia, gemma, giselle, grace, gwen, hailey, harriet, hazel, heather, holly, ione, isabelle, jasmine, juliet, juniper, layla, lily-rose, lorelei, lorraine, lynette, maisie, marie, marnie, melanie, mimi, misty, odelia, paisley, primrose, renee, rosabel, saffron, seraphina, serenity, sienna, sylvia, tallulah, tara, tatiana, tawny, teagan, teresa, trinity, valerie, verity, whitney, willow, wisteria, wren

ㅤaddison, amery, aster, beau, beverly, blessing, bronte, campbell, cedar, dior, emery, fran, francis, garnett, harper, haven, jewel, laverne, merle, monroe, onyx, raine, sage, sinclair, sunday, taylor, vivian, windsor

💐 ꒱ pronouns

ㅤae/aer, vae/vaer

ㅤbless/blessings, bou/quet, ca/cake, cre/cream, crea/creativity, day/dream, decor/decorations, design/designer, determined/determination, dre/dreams, ele/gants, enchant/enchanting, flo/flowers, fun/funs, graci/gracious, grand/grands, happy/happys, ici/icing, lo/love, magic/magical, pale/pales, perf/perfection, rose/roses, smi/smiles, special/specials, sweet/cream, sweet/sweetness, wed/wedding, whi/white

💍 ꒱ titles

ㅤthe wedding planner, [x] who makes brides happy, [x] who'll plan your perfect reception, [x] who brings magic to all attendees, the elegance of marriage, [x] who brings dreams to reality, the cookie with elegant icing, [x] who's loyal to [x] customers, [x] who never misses a detail, [x] who accepts your design challenge, [x] sweetness, the pale-adorned planner, [x] who'll bless your marriage

[scotianostra]

March 3rd 1847 saw the birth of Alexander Graham Bell in Edinburgh.

Bell’s education was largely received through numerous experiments in sound and the furthering of his father’s work on Visible Speech for the deaf. I covered his father in a post on Saturday.

Bell worked with Thomas Watson on the design and patent of the first practical telephone. In all, Bell held 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators.

The second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, he was named for his paternal grandfather, Alexander Bell. For most of his life, the younger Alexander was known as “Aleck” to family and friends. He had two brothers, Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell, both of whom died from tuberculosis.

During his youth, Alexander Graham Bell experienced significant influences that would carry into his adult life. His Grandfather was a well-known professor and teacher of elocution. Alexander’s mother also had a profound influence on him, being a proficient pianist despite her deafness. This taught Alexander to look past people’s disadvantages and find solutions to help them.

Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother, who instilled in him an infinite curiosity about the world around him. He received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Though a mediocre student, he displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. At age 12, while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noted the slow process of husking the wheat grain. He went home and built a device with rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes that dehusked the wheat. It was his first invention.

A lot has been written about Bell’s invention but before the family emigrated he was only 16, when he accepted a position at Weston House Academy in Elgin teaching elocution and music to students, many older than he. At the end of the term, Alexander returned home and joined his father, promoting his father, Melville Bell’s technique of Visible Speech, which taught the deaf to align specific phonetic symbols with a particular position of the speech organs (lips, tongue, and palate).

After the death of his two brothers, and Aleck’s health deteriorating his father decided, for the sake of his health they had to move to a better climate in the Americas, his son resisted the move at first but he relented, and in July 1870, the family settled in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. There, Alexander’s health improved, and he set up a workshop to continue his study of the human voice. He later took up a position as a tutor at Boston School for Deaf Mutes and settled in the city in 1871.

Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.

These early experiments in speech creation, along with his knowledge of anatomy, informed his own experiments on transmitting speech, which he began in earnest from 1873.

Bell did not think he was inventing a ‘telephone’ during his early experiments. He was working on the holy grail of the day: sending multiple telegraph messages over the same wire. He aimed to make electro-mechanical devices capable of transmitting and receiving different tones for each message.

He was supported financially in this work by the father of one of his students, Gardiner Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer and politician, whose deaf daughter, Mabel, had been taught to lip-read and speak by Bell. Bell fell in love with Mabel. Her father, being aware of Bell’s experiments with possible ‘speaking telegraph’ devices, refused his permission for the couple to marry until Bell had successfully developed his new invention. To speed matters along, he also funded an assistant, Thomas Watson.

Sensing the danger of rival developments for this valuable invention, Bell’s future father-in-law filed an application for ‘Improvements in Telegraphy’ on 14 February 1876. On that very same day a few hours later – or was it actually a few hours earlier? – inventor Elisha Gray filed his own idea for a telephone at the same office. Bell was granted the patent on 7 March 1876. On 9 July 1877, Bell, Hubbard, Watson (and other funders) established the Bell Telephone Company to market the new device. Bell and Mabel married two days later.

Controversy remains as to whether Bell or his father-in-law might have had access to the details of Gray’s patent through an office clerk in Hubbard’s pay. The clerk seemed to admit as much in a later court case, but Bell’s patent was upheld, as it was in the many cases which followed.

On 11 August 1877, Bell and Mabel arrived in Britain from the USA on honeymoon. In Bell’s luggage was his new communication device, the telephone. Bell travelled the country promoting his invention, even demonstrating the device to Queen Victoria, who was so amused she asked to keep the temporary installation in place. The first telephones went on sale later that year.

Sometimes described as the most valuable patent ever filed, for years following the award, Bell had to defend his patent in expensive and protracted litigation battles brought by a whole range of inventors. In 2002, the US Congress formally recognised Italian Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone, based on prototypes he demonstrated in 1860. Bell and the Italian had shared a workshop in the 1870s. Meucci was pursuing his claim in the Supreme Court when he died in 1889. France and Germany cite their own contenders for the title.

In many respects, Bell’s telephone was flawed, his receiver and transmitter designs being considerably improved by others within a couple of years. Among those were Thomas Edison and Professor David Hughes, who both produced improvements to Bell’s early instrument, transforming the telephone into a truly successful communication device.

Still widely known as ‘the inventor of the telephone’, Bell had given up his interest in this invention by his early thirties. He spent the rest of his life with Mabel and their family in Canada, working on a series of varied projects including flight, sheep breeding, developing a ‘vacuum jacket’ to aid artificial breathing and the founding of the National Geographic magazine. His foremost passion remained enabling deaf people to lip read and speak, therefore blending into a hearing world. This was in itself controversial to sections of the deaf community, disenfranchising those who preferred to communicate using sign language, which they viewed as the primary language of the deaf.

Bell’s last visit to Edinburgh was in November 1920. At a speech given to pupils at the city’s Royal High School, where he had been a student 60 years before, he imagined that this young generation might live to see a time when someone “in any part of the world would be able to telephone to any other part of the world without any wires at all.”

He died on 2nd August 1922 aged 75. On the day of his funeral the telephone systems in the US and Canada were silenced for one minute, can you imagine that happening nowadays!

[six-costume-refs]

Why do you think it’s now standard for the teal alt to get pants? It works well for Parr but for the other three typical teal covers (Seymour, Boleyn, Howard) I feel like the shorts would suit better. Seymour is sort of a stretch but teal has actually never played Seymour with pants - it’s either been a skirt (Liz, Bryony, Shannen) or shorts (Jen, CJ, Vicki)

I think it was ultimately a redesign for Paisley Billings as a result of the changing cover/costume system.

Similar to what you pointed out with Seymour, teal didn’t always have a super clear default. It did originate with shorts, with Vicki Caldwell, Jennifer Caldwell, and Cherelle Jay all wearing shorts as either their primary or one of their primary variations. But then Nicole Kyoung-Mi Lambert had shorts but they weren’t a primary variation, and Bryony Duncan, Elizabeth Walker, and Shannen Alyce Quan all never had shorts OR a particularly generic variation in general. (Also, quick note that Jen did wear her H skirt for Seymour).

Compare that to pink alt, orange alt, and redesigned black, which all always had a consistent primary variation even when some had different variations on top of the main:

(L-R: Vicki Manser with shorts, 2019 West End; Nicole Kyoung-Mi with pants as effectively her primary variation, 2019 pre-Bway US Tour; Bryony Duncan with Howard skirt as effectively her primary variation, 2019 NCL/2021 UK universal swing. Cassy Lee A variation, 2019 UK Tour; Hana Stewart, 2019-21 West End; Zara MacIntosh, 2019-21 West End)

So by the time they got to 2021 West End cast change and the changed alt system, orange/pink both had obvious designs to use, but teal didn’t have anything standardized. That’s probably how we got to the spot of there even being something new.

But as far as why they decided to go for pants rather than shorts or a skirt:

(L-R: Danielle Rose and Paisley Billings, 2021 West End; Elizabeth Walker, 2019 NCL; Grace Melville and Leesa Tulley, 2022 UK Tour; Monique Ashe-Palmer, 2022 West End)

A. Danielle and Paisley got switched in their alt costume assignments, with Paisley originally being intended to have orange. This was after at least initial fittings. It may have been even farther into the process. It’s possible that Paisley got pants purely because she had already been fit and patterned (or with construction even started) for pants with orange alt. That may be supported by the style of her pants, which were the front lacing style that orange typically has. This differed from both all previous teal pants and the next variation as worn by Grace Melville, all of which had side lacing, although with Monique Ashe-Palmer they have switched back to front lacing. So…it’s possible that it was a logistical thing with her having just already been fitted for that style of pants. It’s also just more straightforward and easier to consistently fit for future actors.

B. Still might have just felt like pants were the best fit for Paisley and/or her covers. Shorts were mainly just given as a convenience thing to the alts who were also Cleves covers so they’d only need to change the top, which Paisley obviously didn’t need since she wore principal for Cleves. A skirt would have been most in line with the typical design for B/S/H as 3/4 of her 2nd/3rd covers, but they may have felt like it just wasn’t a good fit for any number of reasons (maybe too many skirts between principals and it being the primary variation for Esme/Rachel/Roxanne). The pants with peplum is undeniably a Parr variation, but Parr was one of her second covers and orange alt for Seymour/Parr has always used pants with peplum as well. The peplum shape also really helps to visually distinguish it. Might have just felt like it was ultimately still different and generic enough to work.

——————————————

First photoset; all photos directly from each actors’ Instagrams

Second photoset: posted by @/claudiakariuki, @/elizabethswalker, @/gracemelville_, @/leahvassell

[sixthemusicalextras]

@/paigeleigh_photograpy on Instagram, 25 April 2023

Okay this is the last one I swear lol

[unwrittenemmy]

Day one hundred and seventy-two of posting every six queen

DAY ONE SEVENTY-TWO - GRACE MELVILLE - CATHERINE OF ARAGON

[six-another-timeline]

grace aragon monique boleyn nat cleves leesa howard harriet parr Oh uk tour 4.0 fans we are being blessed

[glidingsilvery]

Avant-Première - Grâce à Dieu (2019)

(📷 Nicolas Spiess / Cinéma Comoedia)

[magnoliasandarson]

ugly

Late Spring in Blüdhaven had always been special to Dick. Melville Park wasn't anything grand, not like the Manor's expansive grounds had been, but there were lights strung through the trees that made it look like a scene from a fairytale. On slow patrols, he would perch on the Band Shell and watch the night flyers flitter through the sparkling branches. It was beautiful.

There was no such beauty now.

He sat on the Band Shell, gloved hands dripping blood onto the cold stone, staring out at the trees. They didn't look magical anymore; it just looked like lights in trees. Dick was a fool for ever wasting time on the trees, for ever believing. He took all the magic with him.

There was a dull ache in Dick's chest that drowned out the pain from his bruised knuckles. He pushed up and grappled back over to the Red Line. He ignored the pang of something as he hopped on top of the train, the phantom of laughter chasing after him even as the world was blissfully ripped from his ears by the wind. There was no comm in his ear tonight- there hadn't been in weeks. He was all alone.

Nightwing tore through the business district like a phantom, not a word spoken as he moved from alley to alley. It was a quiet night, most nights had been quiet recently, but Dick Nightwing needed a fight. His escrima sticks stayed holstered at his sides, bloody gloves growing more gory with each encounter. He needed to hurt.

Late Spring in Blüdhaven had once been beautiful. Dick had been proud to drag his friends from tiny park to tinier park, to go to movies on the grass, to visit the frankly frigid shitty beach. He had loved late spring, had loved seeing Robins appear in late April, had loved seeing the fledglings in May. He was a bird boy, after all. He had loved it all. He couldn't find it in himself to love any of it, now.

Nightwing found himself at St. Eustace. He didn't attend services and would probably burst into flames if he ever stepped inside, but he wasn't there for the church itself. He crossed the opulent roof in utter silence, tracing a familiar path to a familiar sight, his favorite the gargoyle. There was nothing special about the gargoyle anymore. It had been special once, but there was nothing making it special anymore. Some nights, Dick wanted to destroy the snarling stone. He resisted the urge, and lowered himself to the ledge, perching next to the monster. You know what they say about birds of a feather.

Dick wiped his gloves on the stone, silent as he watched the darkness absorb. His hand absently patted the space between himself and the granite behemoth, remembering a different flash of red that had graced the spot. He looked out to his city. He couldn't stand any of it anymore.

This had once been a beautiful sight.

He had once been ecstatic to show the gargoyle off, "it can't beat the ones in Gotham, but it's a good substitute!"

He had once laughed the entire night, trading jokes with his little shadow, his little wing.

There was no light here, even as the sun rose, there was no light left for Nightwing. When he retreated to his trashed apartment, carelessly stepping on shattered picture frames in his boots, he couldn't find it in himself to turn on the lights. He couldn't look at his home, couldn't look at the wreckage of the memories.

There was no beauty left in the world.

And Dick couldn't stand to look at the ugly truth.

[cctinsleybaxter]

2024 in Books

I didn't get quite as much reading done as I would've liked this past year, but the 30 books I did read were all over the place in terms of quality and subject matter so I'd call that a success. One trend of note was that I kept accidentally reading the fabled upper-middle class white American man's Great American Novel, and, worse, liked them best of all.

The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings

Cummings' semi-fictionalized autobiography begins with the abrupt end of his service as a volunteer medic in WWI, having been arrested and interned by the French with his coworker/best friend and marked as missing by the US embassy, and I can apparently be tricked into like poetry if it's disguised as all that. My very first note says '[Joseph] Heller was here,' and that only became more apparent as the book went on. I'm flabbergasted that with time it lost status as a classic, and that people haven't pointed out its massive influence on all sorts of 20th century-defining media when it's THE prison novel. To describe the inhabitants of The Enormous Room or even pick and choose individual lines would be to recite poetry, which for me is like turning gold back into straw (oh god.. it's happening... American werewolf transformation.mp4), but everyone really should check out Cummings' structuring and storytelling graces here. Others have talked about a gift for pivoting between a kind of stereotypical artsy romanticism and stereotypical academic traditionalism, but if I had to sum him up in a word? Obnoxious <3

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Almost landed with the honorable mentions because it overstays its welcome and the descriptions of rape and torture progressed far beyond my stomach's limit, but like. Yeah. I don't think comparisons to Dostoevsky are overblown at all; hamfisted and predictable in places yet deeply clever and unexpected, NYC richboy ennui at the end of the 20th century has been captured so perfectly you can practically hear the cork going into the bottle. The moment I began to tire of the business card scene from the movie repeating ad nauseam and the My Immortal outfit montages and the hilariously-named restaurants where they know you I realized that it was a structural choice and started enjoying them all over again. My favorite chapter is one in which Patrick Bateman makes a last ditch effort to stop being a psycho by escaping to the Hamptons with his girlfriend ("like a spider, she accepted") only to spend the whole vacation vomiting in terracotta pots and standing around listlessly holding an ice pick. My favorite scene and line will have to remain a sickening, awful surprise.

The Devil's Candy: An Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco by Julie Salamon

Salamon signed on with Brian De Palma to document production of his Oscarbait adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities well before it became a notorious flop, and thanks to that this is one of- if not the- best books for explaining how a movie gets made. It's smart without talking down to its audience, and the fact that the film by all accounts sucked, continually and at every level, is icing on the cake for me. The approach Salamon took to forty-odd interviews and constant observational sessions, ultimately biographizing De Palma* as well as documenting the studio process is really good journalism, mostly very nuanced in how it describes people but also fun enough to select a few villains. There are so many details I'd like to share, but my favorite is the constant allusions to people taking vitamins, supplements, and random pills PAs gave them like candy because 1., it was 1990, 2., on a movie set you are not allowed to get sick, you will be killed, if the production is on a tight schedule and budget you will be killed more.

*As someone who has mixed-to-negative feelings on his movies I learned he's a very earnest artist who doesn't talk to his editors, so mystery solved.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

"For anyone who has experienced Moby-Dick, it is a privilege to introduce it to another reader- but a privilege that is abused if extended much beyond the invitation." -Andrew Delbanco

"The real joy in Moby-Dick is the pure act of reading itself" -Fone Bone in Bone (2001), Jeff Smith

"the x-files was groundbreaking because it was the first good tv show that was also bad" -Tumblr user thexfiles

Second favorite book ever.

Re-thinking History by Keith Jenkins

Jenkins wrote this short textbook in 1990, arguing that the way history is taught, especially in higher education, is centered around the idea that with enough work and primary sources an objective, fundamental past can be discovered and accepted across nonpartisan lines, while history taught from 'alternate' viewpoints is relegated to elective courses. Depressing that not much has changed in over thirty years, but I think the structure of Jenkins' argument is really helpful if you want to be able to talk about this stuff with people and push for change with institutions. His intent to make history an intersectional issue ("the ideas I discussed had long been circulating in practically all the other discourses around...”) means he lectures as such, and while I don't agree with everything he has to say we have way more common ground than is usual for me and philosophers. I'd also like to extend a special thanks to the tens of of grad students on here who started running their mouths about James Fitzjames shortly after I finished reading; if I wasn't sold on the argument that empathy isn't a progressive or even functional way of engaging with the past that did it.

From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

This is the best Stephen King book. It suffers from some of the same bullshit as all the worst Stephen King books, I think taken as a Vietnam war allegory and as a working class story (about cops?? famously working class) it may even be uniquely bad, I disliked the epilogue and think it should've ended with the last chapter, but I loved it. Not the second run at a haunted car story I thought it was going to be, but a science fiction story (within a story) wherein you are reading about nothing mattering at 800 miles an hour. It also made me realize that much as I tend to dislike King and his reign over my favorite genre he really is talented, and might be the best in the business at writing not just addiction but what can only be described as intrusive thoughts.

Okay, get in :-)

The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman

I have a deeply embarrassing phobia of eye floaters, something I'm only admitting here because it's too stupid (or perhaps.. endearing?) to use against me. The first time I 'saw' them at five years old was the first memory I have of feeling real fear as a child, and I always wondered if there was a horror author who could manage to capture that feeling- not in a Lovecraftian space creature way, not over-explaining, just imparting the dread of a little kid experiencing the banal everyday for the first time and it making them sick to their stomach.

Well, here you go. Aickman doesn't make the mistake of lunging for 'what's the scariest thing that could happen next?' He likes a yarn, indescribable only in that it would take every adjective, and incredibly well-written beginning to end. Even the stories that didn't do it for me gave me something to chew on, but my absolute favorites were The Trains and The Inner Room.

Honorable Mentions

An Unauthorized Fan Treatise by Lauren James

This compilation of blog entries from a fan of a fictional 2010s monster-of-the-week show was reworked into a published YA novel that I haven't read, but I think the original formatting of a website with hyperlinks and comment sections you have to manually scroll through is quintessential to its working in the first place. People are writing more and more fiction revolving around the internet I grew up on (some of them grew up on it with me!), but this is one of very few I've found to have both the correct voice and an engaging plot. My equivalent of taking a mass market on an airplane so a little surface-level, but the finer details had me covering my mouth to laugh in horror because yeah, that's exactly how it would've played out.

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

The entire plot stemming from an argument over a dinner jacket is hot.

Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony

"The Americans only counted down to add drama for their television." -Vostok guidance and trajectory expert Yuri Mazzhorin

A years-old rec from @barstoolblues that presents an excellent biography of Gagarin, probably as comprehensive as was possible in the 90s, but even more interesting insight into the space race. With years of interviews and research to sort through Doran and Bizony aren't always economical in their pacing, but the book is well-cited, well-written, and never boring. I also think it truly helps to have 'third party' (UK) authors who're critical of the USSR in very different ways than Americans and who are willing to be just as critical of the US. You'll have to turn to the book for wider context, but one of my favorite anecdotes is that they made Gagarin's professional rival Gherman Titov suit up ("dressed in the twentieth century's most distinctive suits of armour…") and go to the launch pad with him as his understudy. World's funniest, saddest psychological torture, though they did get to clonk helmets as a kiss goodbye which is very cute.