It feels like a perfect night
For breakfast at midnight
To fall in love with strangers
Ah-ah, ah-ah

22
by Taylor Swift

Full honesty here. I am not a legitimate Swifty. I haven’t been following Taylor Swift since her debut. In fact, I didn’t even notice when Folklore, Evermore or Taylor’s versions of Fearless and Red came out during the pandemic. But something was different when she released Midnights. What changed? I had a teenage daughter whose casual “listening to Taylor Swift in the car” became a shared obsession.

The Eras tour was announced and we attempted to buy tickets, but I didn’t know all the mysterious incantations — verified fan, Capital One card — needed to purchase entry to the concert. But I did know StubHub and Seat Geek, so once the scalpers bought up most of the tickets, I started a fun hobby of watching ticket prices to see if maybe, just maybe, we could go. I checked the price in other cities to see if it was cheaper to fly somewhere, get a hotel, and see Taylor in Pittsburgh or Minneapolis or Detroit. It was not. Every time I looked the prices went up past reasonable to extravagant to embarrassing.

My fatal flaw was mentioning my ticket searching hobby to my daughter. When her reaction wasn’t “MOM, you are SO lame,” but instead “I’d go to Taylor Swift with you” our fate was sealed and my hobby became a quest. I compared resale sites, contrasted seat locations and venues and finally picked out seats, only to have my credit card reject what was obviously a purchase outside of my normal tendencies. (Okay, I also shouldn’t have tried the transaction after midnight local time – every one of my actions screamed fraud to the banking AI algorithms.)

But after appeasing the credit card overlords, I dropped more money than I will ever admit on two tickets, a few weeks before my daughter’s fifteenth birthday. I reached out to our family and invited everyone to contribute, so the tickets could be from all of us. This was in no way an attempt to offset our extravagant purchase (because again, they cost a humiliating amount of money) but a way to let everyone be a part of what I hoped would be a keystone memory for my daughter.

Her birthday had the potential to be awful. First school then choir practice then basketball practice; she’d be gone from the house from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. The only break was a planned run to the DMV so she could get her driver’s permit. Luckily, she woke up to a family group text with a picture of the tickets. She’s not a screaming hysterical happy person, especially in the morning, but her birthday was saved and her dedication over the next two months to learn every lyric of every song in the set list showed just how much our gift meant.

The anticipation was amazing. We sang. We made friendship bracelets. I joined Facebook groups. I researched logistics. We bought our clear plastic bag for the stadium. We had something big to look forward too. Something big and ridiculous and fun, just her and me, and that wasn’t something we’d had since March of 2020 when COVID hit.

In the midst of the excitement I let worry creep in. What if we got sick? What if traffic was terrible and we couldn’t get to the stadium? Could we take water? Snacks? What shoes should we wear? Should we stand in line at the merch tent for 12 hours the day before the concert to make sure whe got the perfect memorabilia?

In the end, everything went wrong and everything worked out. My husband was going to drive and pick us up, but when we got near the venue there was a lovely middle school parking lot, so we paid the energetic attendant $25 and my husband took an Uber home. My daughter and I queued at our gate and raced into the stadium, but didn’t immediately get in the merch line, so I had to leave during the concert to get her the coveted quarter zip and Midnights CD (sadly my water bottle was sold out.) Our seats were behind the sound tower, so we couldn’t see anything that matchstick sized Taylor did at center stage, but the screen was huge and we saw the show of our lives. The girls next to us crammed 5 girls into 4 seats and they were lovely and sang their hearts out and traded friendship bracelets with us.

And everything was better than we’d dreamed. Our seats were club level, but we had no idea that meant air conditioning, easy access to food and bathrooms, and our own Taylor Swift Eras backdrop for an epic picture. The opening act, Gracie Abrams, is one of my daughter’s favorite and she played more songs than expected. We were in the last row of our section, so no one ruined the night by shouting the lyrics, singing off key, or spilling anything on us. I got to talk to strangers from Idaho, Utah, and New Mexico and trade bracelets with kids, teens, grown-ups, security guards, concession stand workers, and the guy who sold me merch.

There is so much wrong with this story. First, my ridiculously unfair privilege to spend the amount of money I spent to see a concert that I didn’t deserve to see. Facebook groups were filled with people pleading for tickets who have been fans since the beginning and couldn’t afford $700 for scalped obstructed view seats in the fifth level. Second, it’s disgusting how much StubHub, Seat Geek, and brokers made on Taylor Swift’s art and Ticketmaster’s complacent negligence. Finally, it made me sad that the concession workers – every single one I talked to was a Swifty – were in the venue but couldn’t watch the show, but only listen to the echoes of music through the concourse.

But for me there was so much that felt right after years of being afraid that nothing on this scale would ever feel right again. After my run to the merchandise line, during All Too Well (10 minute version), the logistics were finally complete, and I let myself escape into the joy of the night for a few eras. My daughter and I gasped at the heat of the flames that burned during Bad Blood. We cried together when Back to December was one of our surprise songs. I sang my heart out to the self-deprecating lyrics of Anti-Hero, a glorious anthem to the entire night, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” As we left the stadium, we experienced a last magical goodbye as a coveted piece of confetti blew off a woman’s cowboy hat onto the ground in front of us. I reached down and captured one last memento of a perfect night.