It’s A Wonderful George Bailey Goodbye To 2024
What has 2024 been like? It feels wrong to say ‘difficult’ in a world that has experienced 2020 and 2021. Two years should be long enough to get over death, anxiety, stir craziness, isolation, terror. Shouldn’t it? It doesn’t feel even a bit like enough. Survival is not joyful. Resilience feels grim and scarred. Nothing inspires cheer, nothing is wonderful.
Life lessons from a difficult year
I am more than I was in 2022, a feeling that I have not had in many years. I used to be able to look back at all the bad stuff and really believe that I was richer for having survived them all. I don’t exactly feel that gratitude because why should I need to experience trauma to prove I’m strong? Why should I need to suffer to deserve kindness? Why does dignity have to be earned via performed tragedy? No, the time for rationalisation is over. Life has sucked, massively and it is not my fault or my gift.
But there are life lessons that have gone from platitudes to reality inside me now. Most compliments and insults have nothing to do with who you are or what you have. And they have everything to do with what people are feeling in that moment. It has made it possible to navigate some dramatic about-faces this year. Jobs that wooed me and unceremoniously dropped me. Dating app matches that were effusive in affection and also vitriol. Audiences that made me feel like a star and then like they were there to witness my execution.
Most people don’t bother keeping their emotions as clean as they do their bodies and homes. Resentment and shame are allowed to fester. Excitement and affection are dumped into ROI boxes. Lashing out is a commonplace way to navigate life. Power grabs for the privilege of being messy, of having others with less clean up after you or endure your emotional vomit – that’s how many live their lives.
There’s nothing to understand or empathise or support about this. It’s irresponsible emotional housekeeping and often unavoidable. Pondering this makes me rethink how I frame collaboration, companionship, love and even friendship. This is my grim end to 2024.
A Christmas miracle: Hope in unexpected places
I come to the close of 2024 still standing, no panic attacks despite the poison swirling around me and I’m not anybody’s poster child for starry-eyed fantasy. I survived and my brand of hope is still a dirt-streaked face dressed in tatters and going barefoot over the wreckage that this world has caused itself.
The miracle was a voice note from Shaun Williams – acting coach, teacher and recognisable everyman from dozens of ads you’ve seen already. The note said,
“Sorry I’ve been MIA. It’s a whole story I won’t get into now. I’m in a play, my return to stage. And I was wondering if you’d like a complimentary ticket. It’s a sweet, simple Christmas play. Not with theology but a sweet family story. This is out of the blue, I know but I thought I’d love to have you watch it…if you’d like to, of course.”
Shaun is also a friend and a really good friend in my new reframing, as I realised once the play was over. Shaun is as close to a real-life George Bailey as I could think of. And I wouldn’t have thought of him simply because I’ve let myself be blinded by the muck that immediately surrounds me. It becomes easy to forget that the world is not the gutter that you find yourself in. Easier than admitting that the path that led you to the gutter may not have been an accident. Especially if like me, you’re prone to setting yourself above others in your mind to avoid feeling the sting of disappointment in humanity.
The Shaun Williams of George Bailey
The story could so easily have been cheesy or preachy. I was glad that it didn’t have any religious connotations as nothing about the idea of sky daddy feels loving or peaceful to me. The protagonist George Bailey is no Mary Sue (a description of fictional characters I only learnt this year from one of you). His good actions seem less planned and more like random acts of kindness. When a younger sibling is drowning, it’s a good instinct to jump in to save them. Perhaps not every person’s instinct but it is an instinct that comes from who you are (which also includes impulsive and impractical).
My favorite moment in the play was a conversation with Violet (the town’s painted woman, which I think would be a period-appropriate term). Violet is leaving town and closing her account at the Bailey Building & Loan. George hands her the documents including a character reference that she will need to get an apartment in New York. Ever the coquette, she curls her lip and jokes about if she only had a character to speak of. George looks her in the eye and tells her,
“Moving away from home to build a life in New York City takes a great deal of character.”
Maybe it was the way Shaun played it or maybe it was because it was Shaun playing it. But I can see the real life Shaun Williams saying something like that in exactly that way. He’s a big guy and the actor playing Violet is a petite woman. The male gaze, especially when unflinching is so often threatening, even more so when directed at a woman and one like Violet. Somehow Shaun never looks like that. In that moment there was the the kind of empathy that had not an ounce of pity and respect without a whisker of fear (too often seen in the way men talk to women). *Chef’s kiss* Perfection. Coming right at a time when I’m seething from the sins of men on dating apps, it’s good to remember that masculinity can also look like this.
Akvarious Productions ‘It’s a wonderful life’ at Prithvi Theatre
At the same time, George Bailey isn’t depicted as a paragon of masculine virtue by way of being asexual. In an earlier scene, as Violet walks by, a group of young men hoot and appear in various stages of nervous attraction – George one of them. George finds love with Mary who is the date of George’s friend at the dance that this same friend invited George to. I don’t find a reference to this dynamic on the Wikipedia page so perhaps this was a creative choice. I like it. There’s a relatable imperfection about the attractions and relationships in Bedford Falls.
‘It’s a wonderful life’
Speaking of women, the standout performer of the cast for me was Prerna Chawla who simultaneously plays a wizened widow, a foul-mouthed barmaid and the sultry Violet. She was stellar in each of the roles, switching easily from creaky joints to a gun-toting Italian clambering onto the shoulders of a cop to stop him arresting George to the sashay and shimmer of Violet. If you don’t have personal associations, couldn’t care less about Christmas and find guardian angels cheesy, Prerna is the one that’ll have you feeling like this experience is well worth it.
But I think what elevated this play was that it felt like the people making it truly believed in it. Even with the inclusion of a guardian angel and alternate universes, I didn’t feel like I had to suspend disbelief at any point. I felt the struggles of the townsfolk to trust while the market crashed in 1929. I smelt the drying fish on the docks as various characters wait for ships to take them away on their dream journeys. I felt the race against time and also money that the Baileys were running. I could even feel the sludge of ruin on the ground in the alternate reality of Potter’s slums, taverns and broken windows. Thus the ending felt like a personal revelation, a gift just for me, a true miracle of Christmas.
Prithvi theatre is such a perfect place to invite audiences into a story as it allows performers to emerge from within the audience and use the aisles as part of the stage. There was some deft use of stage props to depict everything from a local bar to the Bailey’s shop to a church wedding to the alternate reality where George never existed to the bridge where George saves his brother and also contemplates ending his life. I’ve been seeing this theatre my whole life and even performed on it in a vacation workshop as a kid. This is only the second time I’ve ever seen a play use the platform above as part of the stage with characters and dialogues (the other being Guards at the Taj). This play deserved every clap of the standing ovation it received.
Shaun told me that the actor who played the antagonist Potter was the director of the play, Akarsh Khurana. I was too shy to ask to speak to him directly so I can only hope my words find their way to him anyway. This was such a great play full of sensitive creative choices and heartfelt delivery of a touching story. Thank you for making my Christmas, cast & crew of Akvarious Productions ‘It’s a Wonderful Life‘.
About the play
Director: Akarsh Khurana
Cast: Dilshad Edibam, Faisal Rashid, Garima Yajnik, Kashin Shetty, Prerna Chawla, Sidhant Seth and Shaun Williams
Akvarious Productions: Instagram, Facebook
Finding Miracles in Everyday Moments
As with everything else I’ve complained about before speaking about the play, I’ve struggled to write this post. Even writing which once came as easy as breathing to me feels like labour now. Since this play, I’m determined that it be a labour of love. I’m standing where George Bailey is at the start of the play – depleted and exhausted by life. It feels like a struggle to even remember that help is available and freely offered.
So I’m trying to peg tangible associations of this love, this wonderfulness that occurs in moments in life. To remind myself even years later. I had forgotten that I I get this way around this time of the year. December brings uncomfortable weather for tropical me. It’s weeks without sunshine, still recovering from the pollution of the religious festivals before. And it’s having to face the traumatic memories of Christmastimes past.
I learnt of the deaths of three people. One, someone I had only met once but who changed my life in profound ways of activism, politics, love and poetry. My last words to him were, “You don’t value people. You don’t value love.” Another I had seen across the room fretfully because our common person would not introduce us. And the third, just now, a good man who raised a good man. Such pettiness, such smallness, so much deliberate missing of the wonderful. There is pain unexpected, in a heart that has felt withered to the point of dead.
Yet, there are miracles, big and small. As Morgan Freeman says in the voice of God in Bruce Almighty,
“Parting your soup is not a miracle; it’s a magic trick.”
This year I went back to music. That wasn’t the miracle. I was able to because LizzyBeth accompanied me. We even collaborated, a lovely throwback to the first time we had. At that time I wasn’t able to appreciate what a miracle it is to be able to create something with someone else that enriches you both. The miracle is the opportunity that I got to do this. The miracle is my friend.
A friend is surviving the aftermath of walking out of an abusive situation. I’ve always thought of her a little girl, someone I can feel powerful about protecting. I would not be able to be who she is being right now now. I do not have the strength for this gentleness, the fortitude for this steady path of sanity that she’s walking. And she is kind and generous to me – something that teaches me to reciprocate by not imposing my questions or advice on her. The miracle is being loved by her.
Someone I knew only as a voice in one of my Clubhouse rooms told me what I needed to hear to accept help for my health. It started me on the journey that has led to here. Feeling a possible future after giving myself permission to feel all my pasts. The magic of technology makes it possible for me to speak to this person as often as I want, across timezones and continents. This month alone we’ve had emergency intervention conversations on trauma, on mental health, on pain treatment, on intergenerational tragedies, on class, race and gender worries. I am not alone. I am seen. I am heard. I am okay. The miracles in our sharing, Cal.
The year has been strewn with calls and messages at exact moments of my misery. How fun that the name of the person responsible for these translates to ‘God is gracious’. Another miracle. These are Christmas trees shared with me by two of these people. This is my biggest miracle of all – a Christmas free of superstition, of dread and filled with only hope.
May you find light to see the miracles. If you have the courage and strength to be the miracles, may you be reminded of what you bring to the world just by existing. Season’s greetings to you all.
If you liked this post, you might take a stroll down my past Christmas ruminations.
- Christmas in my 40s: Navigating Yuletide in a Desi Identity
- A Beautiful Day in a Soft Neighborhood (2022)
- Santa’s Lesson Of Generosity (2015)
- Tis The Season To Be Jolly (2008)
- Following The Star (2021)
- Christmas Gift (2010)
- Christmas (2009)
If you’ve read to the end, would you mind taking a poll? I had initially planned to share my spoken word pieces in my podcast. But I’ve been toying with the idea of audio recording some of my posts to make them more accessible to people who prefer audio.
What a treat to see your enjoyment of the play. I smiled so big at your enthusiasm and exuberance. Shaun sounds like a wonderful person and I’m super happy to hear you’re connected with him again.
It’s been inspiring watching you “become more” this year, not because of things that happened to you, but because of how you’ve chosen to respond. We can choose to let the world make us, or we can make ourselves, and you are definitely one of the later.