A confession on the inner workings of my mind, “It’s a Wonderful Life” edition

Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon.

–Traditional American Folk Song

George Bailey, I’ll love you til the day I die!

–Mary Bailey as a little girl/It’s A Wonderful Life

 

 

When I was writing about True Love the other day, the original version of the post included a much longer section about why I would not change my first experience of love. I edited it heavily for several reasons, but  the main reason is that it made me sound like a lunatic. Which of course I am. So to honor the spirit of lunacy, I decided to do a separate post about the thought process behind the original writing of that paragraph.

Yes, I am writing about my own outtakes.

Yes, I know that outtakes are typically things that are left out which would imply that they not be seen.

Yes, I’m going to post this anyway because it’s very indicative of what I think like.

Yes, I realize that no one really cares about that. It hasn’t stopped me from writing any of my other posts, so it didn’t stop me from writing this one either. This is all an exercise in narcissism anyway, so I might as well go all out with it.

 

So.

In case you didn’t read it, the thought in my post yesterday was that I might have handled the aftermath of being in love for the first time better if it had happened when I was older, but I wouldn’t go back and change it if I could. When I was writing about it, I was thinking about being able to change things in general. There are a lot of reasons why I wouldn’t change anything about my life. They boil down to not being able to predict the impact one small change might have on everything else. I like to think of it as the “George Bailey Effect.”

(If you haven’t seen It’s A Wonderful Life you probably don’t want to bother reading any further. If you really do want to, you might want to Google the plot first.)

In the most pivotal scenes of the movie, an angel shows George Bailey what the world would have been like if he’d never been born. At one point, he sees what would have happened to his wife Mary. Instead of being a lovely married mother of four with perfect vision and high heels, she would have been a frumpy old maid librarian with glasses, bushy eyebrows and sensible shoes. This always makes me wonder. Partly I wonder about the obvious things like how important every minute of our life is, and how each of our lives impacts so many people. But I also wonder why it’s so bad to be a librarian, why she would have such bad taste in shoes and clothes if George had never existed, and about her eyebrows. In my original post about True Love, eyebrows feature prominently.

Why in the fuck are bushy eyebrows and ugly shoes always the external symbol of an old maid in classic film? Were women not allowed to tweeze unless they’d gotten laid? Do eyebrows thin out automatically when a man is attracted to a woman? Why didn’t these bushy-browed old maids simply pluck their eyebrows and find love? Why did having bushy eyebrows make them wear sensible shoes and frumpy dresses? Is there some sort of shoe police that prevents women with bushy eyebrows from buying sexy shoes? What is the cutoff? Is there an eyebrow ruler? Do film makers think that we don’t realize that eyebrows alone do not make a woman unlovable?

It’s not only Mary Bailey, you know. They did it to Bette Davis in Now, Voyager too–poor Aunt Charlotte didn’t get to tweeze and no one loved her. Not even her own family. She was only able to tweeze after a nervous breakdown led her into therapy and cured her of the need to wear glasses. After she tweezed, everyone loved her, including Paul Henreid.

 

I sure am glad I have thin eyebrows. It has clearly changed my life completely. One former love did tell me that I have perfect eyebrows, so they are important to at least some young men.

 

So. Yeah.

That’s why it got left out of the original post.

It was…uh…tangential.

So when I hear Mary Bailey say: “George Bailey, I’ll love you til the day I die” it has multiple layers of meaning to me. Some of them actually having to do with loving somebody til the day I die. That’s the part that makes me cry.

 

But one of those layers is all eyebrows and sensible shoes.

Which might make it seem a little less poignant to some people. If you really know me, it might make it even more meaningful. Or it might just make you shake your head.

 

Either way, it’s one of my favorite lines in the movie.

 

 

 

 

A tangential note in a post about tangential thoughts in other posts. I just can’t help it:

I still don’t see why being a librarian makes you an old maid. All the men I would ever be in love with think books are sexy. By extension, what could possibly sexier than a librarian??? Especially a librarian in red shoes?