The Traveling Ridleys: Sunday Journal

A Swiftie I am not. Or I wasn’t anyway. I’m not about to start following her around the world and I don’t think the glitter make up would look good on me, though perhaps that one’s up for debate. However, we had the opportunity to see Taylor Swift in Lisbon last month.

Our nieces are bona fide Swifties and several months ago, when she announced her Lisbon dates, plans were put into motion for a two-week visit anchored by a Taylor Swift show. As the weeks leading up to the concert neared, a “cheat sheet” was delivered to us by our eldest niece so we could learn more. The list represented a lot of work and provided material which ranged from the set list of the (pre-Tortured Poets era) Eras Tour, activities Swifties should do at certain points in the concert, a background on and stories about many of the songs and a final, separate, carefully curated list of “other songs I think you might like”.

Ever the student, I read every word and listened to every song (plus). I learned that I liked quite a lot of them. Melissa and I both did. I downloaded a playlist of my favorites for us to listen to on our recent road trip to Spain. My favorite is her somewhat unknown Cowboy Like Me followed closely by Melissa’s favorite All Too Well. The studying helped. We were prepared.

We set off for our general admission floor seats via train and metro to wait in the hot beating sun a few Saturdays ago. The queue was organized chaos. Surely there was a better way to manage the entry process than cattle prodding us all down into an ever-shrinking funnel to the security check and entry point but if it existed, it was not adopted. It took hours and fried patience a few times, but we were all entertained (and refreshed) by the energetic young woman and her mates selling water and Coca Cola to the queued Swiftie nation.

Then, we entered and after a re-position from the sun-baked section of the floor to the shady half, our wait got much better. The next couple of hours passed much more pleasantly, albeit some of them sitting on the ground. If this fifty-something year old dude had thought his days of floor “seats” at a standing room only general admission concert were over he would have been wrong (for the record, there are nearly 65,000 seats in the Estadio da Luz, we just didn’t choose any of them).

And then, she arrived on stage.

Taylor Swift is a tour-de-force. I later learned that she prepared for the tour by singing the entire set list out loud while running on the treadmill. Every day. Mind you, the show was well over three hours from start to finish. She barely takes a break, and these are mostly short ones with just enough time to change her outfit and for the set to evolve into the new “era”. There are few performing acts to which I could compare this. Bruce Springsteen for one, possibly the Grateful Dead, maybe U2. She is no joke. She is legit. If you’re not afraid of little old Taylor’s stamina, you should be.

But I think the thing that was most amazing is the reverence she captures. Sure, most bands have a following. The Deadheads being perhaps the most famous, but not since the Beatles or Elvis do I think an entertainer has thrilled her followers beyond fandom and into worship. She’s a good role model. She’s tough, powerful, strong, enduring and self-made. Her concerts bring in massive amounts of revenue to local economies. She overcomes obstacles and doesn’t take crap from anyone. And her fans adore her for it. Despite all of our homework, in advance, we were two out of a handful of about 100,000 that didn’t sing along to every single word of every single song. And yes, a few songs actually shook the Earth with, most appropriately, Shake it Off topping the list at .82 on the Richter Scale.