So, on Christmas Eve I watched "It's a Wonderful Life" for about the bazillionth time. To me, the movie is so over-acted and melodramatic, but it still manages to make me cry like a complete idiot. Anyway, I was watching the climatic scene where he is running around town realizing how horribly off all his friends and family would have been, had he not been born. And it gets to the part where the angel has to tell him what has happened to his wife. George Bailey keeps insisting that he be told, Clarence (the angel) doesn't want to. Finally he exclaims, "You're not going to like it!" and then goes on to say in a very grave voice, "she's an old maid, she never got married." And I really had to laugh at this point, because the inference was that this was the absolutely worst thing, the pinnacle of bad things that happened to everybody. Worse than his brother dying at age nine. Worse than his uncle in an insane asylum. Worse even than a whole shipload of soldiers dying in the War because his brother wasn't there to save the transport. The worst thing by far was to be an unmarried woman. Oh yeah, and one other thing. For some reason, by not ever having married George (or perhaps any other man) Mary also required the use of glasses.