You will attend a Taylor Swift concert and it will rain with increasing intensity for more than 4 hours. Some people, paid handsomely by Drew Barrymore, may lead you to believe that this is a sacred experience and actually an altogether better experience than attending a Taylor Swift concert where you and 60,000 other people, including Taylor Swift, remain completely dry, barring spilled drinks and sweat. You will be skeptical of this credence and those who cling so dearly to it.
Some of those same people, the rain people, will bottle the deluge to either keep or sell — a bonafide Swiftian snake oil. Others will politely request for the fans closest to the stage to collect every color of tissue paper confetti that shoots out, each representing a different album/era, and later mail it to them to be showcased in elaborate shadowboxes and scrapbooks commemorating their experiences. The requesters and the fulfillers are of course strangers united by an overwhelming obsession, meeting in a Facebook group created for the weekend of shows at the specific stadium you have tickets for.
The barrier to entry for this group will involve naming your favorite Taylor Swift song, era, and the group’s 6th ground rule: NO sales. On the drive down, you will read full posts out loud to your friends, including one with a photo that places you in the front seat of a car with a completely shattered windshield. The post will explain that the driver, its author, was on their way from Canada when a turkey flew into the glass, but that an employee from Safelite would be starting their shift early in an effort to help them make it in time for the show. The post will end with, “Rain show expected for N2 <3<3<3,” further perpetuating the mythology that inclement weather is a blessing. You will be baffled by the dedication and optimism. You will google “turkeys can fly?”
Once the car you are in enters the traffic queue leading up to the parking lots, you will bear witness to a vehicle marked by a rear-window sticker of the Heath Ledger Joker and his famous catchphrase, “Why so serious?” It will upset everyone, but you will take a picture with it later. When the Jokermobile merges into the proper lane ahead, you will watch the blur of a person dash out from the passenger side to hand-deliver a friendship bracelet as a thank you to the car behind them. You will have been made aware of the friendship bracelets, which are inspired by a song lyric from a bildungsroman of a track, “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” You have not made any or intend to accept one, because it feels wrong. You do not bleed for this woman the way the rain people do and only learned how to “let loose” and also “have fun” in the last few years. You will also feel that to participate in certain rituals would basically be the equivalent of doing a very long line of coke, except the coke is nostalgia, and you know that is a slippery slope – it’s coke – but also, you’re here. And you want to be. Whatever distance you try to cast between yourself and the rain people, who are actually more commonly known as Swifties, is silly. You know 85-89% of the words, and you’re about to stand on wet cement to prove it.
For similar reasons, you are not dressed up. But as it turns out, wearing your lesbian uniform (flannel) categorizes you into the pocket of folklore/evermore. You will feel bad for the people who curated elaborate costumes that will become distorted and rendered absurd from underneath their plastic ponchos, but will be genuinely shocked by the overwhelming presence of the same cotton candy swirl SHEIN button-down on just about every man in the crowd (or, secondarily, a Varsity-lettered KARMA t-shirt). You will not have empathy for the poor footwear choices of others. You will be thankful your sneakers are extremely forgiving after all the rain and dirt.
For the tailgating your friends wishfully prepared for, they will have packed sensible things to enjoy like guacamole and IPAs. Your offerings will include a portable charger no one else seems to need and a book of tear-away New York Times Monday crossword puzzles, but only one pen. It is a miracle that they care about you. Instead of standing in the mud under a tent, you will decide to stay in the car and talk until the conversation turns into you reciting full sections of the Debby Ryan Architectural Digest home tour video until your friends in the front seats are moved to watch it with the audio hooked up to the car’s speakers. It is your 4th or 5th viewing of their eclectic Columbus, Ohio residence and you have most of it memorized, particularly a section where Debby and her husband from the band Twenty One Pilots are inside an atrium, plastered with a psychedelic mushroom mural, that they describe as a place for their friends to gather “after s’mores” — where people have “been tattooed” and “come down from panic attacks.” You will say you like their drunk monkey bathroom and finish off a can of white wine.
Once inside and after waiting in bathroom lines, margarita lines, and chicken lines, you will watch one of the openers, the mononymous GAYLE, sing about everybody hating her and the alphabet, letters A-F. You and your friends will keep saying, “Okay GAYLE!” and it will be funny for no reason every time. You will not properly cherish this time — the single, rainless half hour or so before the storm begins again. You will laugh when the second opener, Phoebe Bridgers, seemingly conjures the morose weather’s return after a performance of her obviously upsetting song, “Funeral.” Every minute between her set’s end and Taylor’s start will be excruciating, but not as bad as every second that passes between the concert’s end and your journey back to the car, but you cannot know this yet. You will only know that a countdown has begun and the screams swirling around you are probably audible from outer space.
You will be in awe of Taylor Swift. You will call her corny. She will kiss her bicep and put on a sparkling blazer to sing a song with the lyrics, “If I was a man, then I’d be the mah-han.” She will dust off and dress up songs you loved when you were 11, and you will realize that in your enjoyment, you and your friends have been tricked into inhaling a bump of the aforementioned nostalgia coke. Every word of Fearless will transport you, especially the entire crowd leaning into the line, “In a storm in my best dress, fearless.” At various points of the concert, you will label Taylor as several things, and temporarily mean them. The shortlist will include CEO, witch, president, and god. She will later tell the crowd, “You’re wild!” and you will shout, “DIRTY DANCING!!” which will not land, even for a population foaming at the mouth for referentia. She will egg on 5 full minutes of raucous applause before even hitting the midpoint of the concert. You will mostly eat it up — even without the downpour it is deserved and you will become convinced she’s probably part machine or extraterrestrial. During the Reputation era, the lights will point up toward the sky in a confusing and hypnotic way, giving the appearance of a spacecraft beaming down. You will take a pretty terrible photo of it, but it will reinforce the comment of an alien or a god.
For the entirety of the concert, the teenager in front of you will snap her entire head around like an owl every few minutes to record clips of the Jumbotron screen located behind you, facing away from the stage and the actual human woman she has come to see. She will refuse to wear her very nice raincoat, and shiver until her boyfriend releases his dry, cotton sweatshirt from underneath his waterproof layer (revealing his SHEIN shirt!). You will watch this become unsurprisingly drenched in record time. She will occasionally use the front-facing camera on her cellphone to record her and her mother singing along to songs from folklore and 1989, which might possibly be sweet if you weren’t also making eye contact with your own terrible scowl in the view. When it is time for the highly anticipated “surprise songs” portion of the show, she will have reached a breaking point with the cold and beg to leave early. Her mother will look completely defeated, confessing herself to be the biggest fan among them. Your unwarranted contempt will melt into feeling sad for each of them. You know in your bones they are going to get into an insane Ladybird-like fight in the car. You will hope they stop at a McDonald’s and say sorry and thank you and sorry again.
After telling the crowd she’s the happiest she’s ever been in her life, Taylor Swift will perform an acoustic version of a song with a chorus that makes absolutely no sense involving the lyrics, “Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room/And every single one of your friends was makin' fun of you/But fifteen seconds later, thеy were clappin' too?” It is highly speculated that her profound joy is in part owed to a relationship between herself and The 1975 frontman, Matty Healy. You will have recently texted a friend that it freaks you out in a way similar to the “my mom is dating my weird teacher” sitcom trope. Taylor will then sit herself down at a piano, frankly appearing drowned, splashing sheets of water off its lid. You may actually scream and nearly collapse when she starts to sing “Invisible,” a song from her debut album. You and your friends have been making guesses and wishes about the possibilities of what could be in store for you during this part of the set, and this was on your list. The truth is that in middle school, you observed a terrible nighttime ritual of listening to this song while crafting elaborate (nonsexual) fantasies (a lot of eye contact and hand-holding) about whichever boy from class was memorably not unkind to you, all in an effort to fall asleep peacefully. It will feel like the loop has finally closed to hear it now, more than a decade later, a completely different person (gay) but with a soft spot for that former girl and her iPod shuffle. The moment will be made even more dramatic because of the rain, but you have still not turned into a believer in what they find beautiful about standing in a public shower, and moreover, you’re not a Swiftie, though you may find it hard to beat the allegations after all this.
Taylor Swift and her dancers will finish out the show strong, singing songs about anti-heroes and sexy babies, being cryptic and Machiavellian because she cares, and of course, midnight RAIN. Fireworks will go off. The friendship bracelet song will play as you exit the stadium in a daze. You and your friends will somehow get back to the car. You will peel off your ponchos, kick away your soaked shoes, and wiggle into the dry, warm clothes packed in preparation for this moment. You will wave goodbye to the Jokermobile. You will try not to fall asleep because your friend who is driving must stay awake, but you will fail. You will sleep on his couch after draping your wet clothes over his shower door, and be stunned that you can get a comb through your rain-tangled hair. You will complain that your shins and knees hurt for 3 whole days. You will remember that that’s what it was all for — the opportunity to complain!
You will have attended a Taylor Swift concert where it will have rained with increasing intensity for more than 4 hours.
You will have attended a Taylor Swift concert where the ends will have justified the means.
Big love,
kaylasomething
i'm glad you had a great time, but i was driving up to maine with 2 of my friends for my other friends' wedding and taylor swift concert traffic made me miss the rehearsal lmao