I Am Swiftie!

If you haven’t heard, and if you are of a certain age, you probably haven’t, the summer’s most incredible phenomenon isn’t the Barbie movie, it is a real-life Barbie named Taylor Swift.

She fills huge stadiums with eighty thousand Swifties, as her fans are known. Currently she is playing Los Angeles. Her six shows are, of course, sold out in the SoFi Stadium, one of the largest indoor venues in the United States, accommodating an audience of up to one hundred thousand. One hundred thousand fans watching Taylor! Sold out for six nights! Los Angeles is going Taylor-crazy. But then every city where she performs goes nuts. In Seattle, thousands of Swifties who couldn’t get into the concert, nonetheless gathered outside the stadium to party.

Most of Taylor’s Swifties are young women and if the cell phone videos they post are any indication, they are having the time of their lives, dressed to the nines, joyously dancing and singing along as she performs. It’s an amazing sight to watch Taylor onstage surrounded by a sea of swaying, dancing fans singing at the tops of their lungs.

I’ve seen Elvis. I’ve seen Bruce. I’ve seen Sinatra. I’ve seen the Rolling Stones. But in all my life, I have never seen anything like this, and I doubt anyone else has either. Estimates are that once she has finished touring North America, Europe, and South America, Taylor’s shows will have netted over one billion dollars. Taylor will go home with in excess of a half a billion.

Watching her perform in a show that is an awesome light-and-sound spectacular, Barbie-perfect in a Versace body suit, wearing silver Christian Louboutin knee-high boots, tossing around perfectly coiffed blondish-brown hair, I get quite a kick out of her. She is a superb pop singer and performer who knows just how to make an audience of eighty thousand feel as though they’ve been invited over for an intimate evening at Taylor’s place.

I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I cannot get out of my mind, “You Belong With Me” (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts”), one of the anthem songs that drives her audiences particularly wild.

It has just been announced that after a lot of fretting she wouldn’t come to Canada, Taylor will appear in Toronto for six shows in November 2024. I am currently trying to put together the $7,000 I may need in order to secure a ticket. I am having some difficulty accomplishing this because my wife has locked me out of our bank accounts. She doesn’t seem to understand.

I am obsessed…

I am mesmerized…

I am Swiftie!