Taylor Swift

There’s plenty of stuff I get wrong as a dad, so it’s pretty great when a day works out as perfectly as it did yesterday. About 9 months ago, I lost my damn mind and spent $800 for two pit tickets to Taylor Swift. In my defense, I had lost my damn mind a few weeks earlier when I bought way too many hundreds of dollars worth of tickets to game 7 of the World Series. Riley decided she didn’t want to go, so I promised to make it up to her at Christmas.

I had her open all her other presents, then casually got to her stocking, which is usually filled with junk food or little gifts, but this time I put the confirmation for the Taylor tickets. She freaked out. And has been freaking out periodically since, whenever it hits her that she’s going to be a few feet from her idol.

The big day finally came yesterday and I signed her out of school at 1:30 for her appointment with Dr. Swift. Riley and her friend both wore the cheerleader costumes from the Shake It Off video and cranked up the 1989 album as they got ready.

We got down to the Sprint Center about 3:15. Will call wasn’t supposed to open until 4:30, but we were able to get our tickets right away and get into the line to get into the building. That was when Riley’s friend’s mom confessed that when I texted her with the presale password, she was whacked up on cold meds and would never have spent all that money otherwise. Awesome.

We ended up in line right next to several Tumblr celebrities who are going to a bunch of shows on this tour. The costumes were fantastic and all the girls were so friendly and complementary to each other.

I did my usual thing and made friends with strangers. When I went to the car, a man asked me who was playing the Sprint Center. I said Taylor Swift, to which he responded, “oh that woman?” I came back with “she’s practically a woman” confusing the hell out of him. He asked, “wait, she used to be a man?”

Good start.

We waited in line about 3 hours, which went really fast. The people in front of us in line got there 6 hours before us. The commitment of Taylor’s fans really was pretty crazy. They finally opened the doors and it was chaos. We were pit right, which ended up being on the left side of the stage. We got sent the wrong way twice and had stopped unnecessarily in a wristband line, but somehow still managed to get right on the rail, about 5 people down from the center.

It was so great to see Riley’s face when she realized we’d finally made it and the stage was 3 feet in front of us. We had plenty of “I can’t believe this moments” mostly that we were poor people in the fancy section and had never experienced anything like it.

However there was a hair plugged d-bag who we also couldn’t believe. He bumped into me and I assumed he was just getting on the rail to take a quick picture. No, he had elbowed some poor teenage girls out of their rightful spot. Security eventually stepped in and put him in his place. Which also put me back in my rightful place as just another one of the 7^th grade girls.

Oh man…Riley’s face when Taylor walked out. I thought it couldn’t be topped, until Taylor walked to our side of the stage. If Taylor had reached out her hand, Riley could have touched her. Riley was in happy tears and instantly lost all motor functions except the one where she waved non-stop at Taylor instead of singing or taking pictures like she did the rest of the time. Every time Taylor walked by Riley did her one man wave. So cute.

We danced. And sang along. And freaked out a lot. And at one point the security guard (who apparently thought I was with Riley’s friend’s mom) pulled me in close for a man to man chat saying something inaudible, but the gist was that he could see I was going to be in good with my lady for the next few months for doing this. He said something about the kind of sex I would get. Aww. Making friends.

The thing is, I absolutely loved every second of the show. One of the guitarists threw Riley a guitar pick, which is like a really cool commemorative 1989 pick. And at one point Taylor Swift’s mom walked in between us and the stage and stopped to take a picture with Riley, her friend and her friend’s mom. The three of them freaked the fuck out afterwards…jumping up and down like they’d won the lottery. And then, the evening ended perfectly…as Taylor walked off stage they started showing fans on the giant jumbo screen behind the stage and the very last image of the night on the big screen was Riley and her friend in their cheerleader costumes.

I just didn’t want it to end. As we were walking to the car, Riley got a text from a friend saying she saw Riley on the jumbotron. So freaking cool. We decided to hit IHOP at 11:30 on a school night, because we had a lot to recap. And we’ll be recapping that night for a really long time. I’m going to mail Taylor a gratuity, because $800 was a fucking bargain and as Riley said, "it was the best night of my life."