Nothing was going to stop us.
I sprung for surprise Taylor Swift tickets for my daughter’s 13th birthday, and she wept with joy. My two daughters and I spent a full month planning our outfits, and it felt like heaven. It required us to fly across the country but we would have flown across the world. I was hell bent.
As the date approached, I tracked the comings and goings of our aircraft like a hog on a truffle. “Where Is My Plane?” Friends, I always knew. I frequently updated my cork board flowchart of backup options for cities we could fly into, rent a car, and drive overnight to SoFi stadium in case our booked flight crapped out.
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Pre-dawn on the day before the show, the Uber driver taking us to the airport drove over a log and our car filled with wasps. Filled. With. Wasps.
He informed me, screaming and running from the car, that he had a deadly venom allergy and had once required a tracheotomy to save his life. I single-handedly beat those wasps out of the car when he veered off the road not once but TWICE, and gamed out every possible version of “take this man to a hospital but also gtfo as soon as possible because we are making this flight, goddamn it.”
At SoFi, my child was so beside herself with excitement that she tripped on her purple Speak Now dress, ripped her knees open, and bled all over her dress. We saw an EMT and kept it moving.
The communion of 70,000 people in the same place for all the right reasons was magnificent; an event closest to any religious experience I have ever had. There were no haters, there was no snark. Anyone inclined that way had long ago sold their tickets, probably for a life-changing profit.
We sat in the nosebleeds for a wildly unreasonable amount of money, and still my daughter thought Taylor Swift was singing directly at her. To be honest, Taylor was singing onstage probably a solid mile away from us, but my daughter’s first words were “SHE’S. RIGHT. THERE.”
I can’t share with you the photos I took of my girls, which will make me cry with happiness until the day I die. The videos I have of them screaming and singing every song just like everyone around us. I now finally understand all those old black and white photos of kids sobbing at a Beatles concert.
Most of my musical heroes growing up were 45-year-old sex pests, so yes, Taylor Swift is a wonderful corrective. She is an authentic artist and an uncanny songwriter, able to simultaneously pierce the heart of a 13-year-old girl with a clever turn of phrase and a key change, but also the heart of this 54-year-old battle axe? I never would have imagined.
The amount my daughter loves her—and feels seen by her—is worth anything to me. I’d get a second mortgage just to recapture that magic, and maybe I will.
So yes, Taylor Swift is my fucking hero.
In a world where so few people and so few things live up to their promises, Taylor Swift delivers. She knows how much her fans love her, and she gives them the kind of live experience that makes it 1 million percent worth it to plan something for a year, fly thousands of miles, and battle an army of wasps and wounds. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
You can view the complete Heroes 2023 series here.
