I'm in my Eras era (Dia's Version)
I tried to get Taylor Swift tickets and lived to tell the tale
Please enjoy an audio reading of this piece, or scroll to keep reading.
Fifteen hours was all it took for me to forget who I am and what I believe in.
Fifteen hours from the moment I decided that I “needed to see Taylor Swift this weekend” and “would stop at nothing.”
Fifteen hours until I stopped at something.
It was Saturday morning when the bells of FOMO started clanging, discordant and foreboding. I’d finished my usual 2-hour Italian lesson wherein I was markedly distracted; at one point, I even said “agnello” (lamb) when I meant to say “giallo” (yellow).
I was still in my pajamas at 11 AM: an oversized t-shirt, some hideous leopard print pants from Target that I’m convinced everyone has, and one of those terry cloth headbands girls use to wash their faces. Little did I know that outfit would take on a life of its own—the uniform of a soldier wounded in The Ticket War. Stalemate. Deodorantless. Swamp-assed. Sitting in a queue of “2000+” Swifties ready to Trojan Horse their way onto Lincoln Financial Field.
I knew that if I was gonna do this, I had to get crafty fast. Flex the kind of guile possessed by people who enjoy networking events.
Having spent six years on Philly’s nonprofit scene, I quickly turned to old fundraiser colleagues, hoping someone might have a connection at the Linc. My friend said she’d already exhausted those options, including a Ticketmaster executive who said he could help her with “anything but Taylor Swift” and that he “couldn’t even help his own kids with this, given the scrutiny.” She had already attended Friday night’s show with her daughter, and they were determined to go again. Her daughter had spent the whole morning crying in bed that it was over. So, we formed an alliance and got to work.
For the popstar stan, your options for engaging in online discourse are endless. And when said popstar is on the most coveted and controversial tour in the history of American ticket-selling, smaller, sadder forums crop up like summer corn. I was on Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and TikTok, dodging bots, scouring every hashtag and subreddit for any kind of lead. Everyone seemed to be in the same crestfallen boat, watching a queue that would not budge, searching for a glimmer of hope in the rhinestone denim jacket they bought just for “Bejeweled.”
–
All the while, I’m getting a play-by-play of Friday night’s show. Fans are going wild that Taylor played “Gold Rush.” I don’t know “Gold Rush.” I don’t know a third of this set list. And it starts to sink in that all the effort I’m putting into getting to this concert is really bizarre, verging on maniacal. But I see these girls in their white cowboy boots and glitter everything and I want to feel what they’re feeling. It reminded me of college when my friends and I—newly minted ravers at a small state school in rural Pennsylvania—would hold full day parties just to watch the Ultra Music Festival live stream. We’d be doing shots of Jager, passing joints, shouting, “that’s gonna be us next year, guys.” It was never us.
(It’s so pure, the way we revel in mere proximity to other people’s life-changing experiences that we probably won’t have—happy for them, hopeful for ourselves.)
–
If you ask me how many times I refreshed Ticketmaster Saturday afternoon, I would say less than 1000 but more than 500. Minutes faded into hours as I studied all of (Taylor’s Versions). Got intimate with different characters from each Era, like “The Archer” and the “Anti-Hero” and old reliable, “Stephen.” I knew I was in deep when, kissing my fiancé on the couch, I pulled back and said, “we better not get into this. I’ll be staring at that queue the whole time.”
I gave up on Saturday’s show around 7 PM when I suspected there was an hour-ish until Taylor would hit the stage. I’d been crawling through the queue for hours at that point, and I’d sworn I’d had enough. I got pizza and ice cream to soften the blow.
Then around 9 PM, my friend texts me: “Go go Que back open for tomorrow. We sr back on.” (Typos included for the full effect. The Eras Tour has its own language of urgency.) Dutifully, I logged my ass back onto Ticketmaster. The words “tickets are not currently available online” evolved into “tickets are sold out now,” and soon enough, I was back in that infamous “2000+” person queue. So was my friend. So was her daughter. We all adjusted our device settings so they wouldn’t lock to keep Ticketmaster active, knowing we’d have to sleep at some point.
–
I woke up at 3:14 AM with stomach cramps. At least that’s what I’m telling myself, because to imagine my body snapping out of slumber for Taylor Swift tickets only confirms I’d lost my mind.
When I checked my phone, I couldn’t believe my eyes: for the first time since this whole debacle began, I saw movement in the queue. 1991 people in front of me. My birth year! Could it be a favorable twist of fate?
And so I fucking commit. I’m going to watch that 1991 dwindle until my eyes bleed, taking screenshots at 1811, 1691, 1391, 986, 686, 191, 86, and 26 until the moment finally arrives…
It’s 4 AM and I’m about to secure as many tickets as humanly possible (so like, eight) to the final night of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Philadelphia. And once I distribute them to my friends and sell the rest to Swifties at face value, I will be a vessel for good karma. Karma will be my boyfriend. The page refreshes…
…
…
“Tickets are sold out now.”
The dairy in my stomach curdles. I am a red hot shade of scandalized. What… the fuck? Oh my god. What the FUCKKKKKKKKKKK???
No thoughts, just expletives.
Sleep is out of the question at this point. I will spend the entire morning tossing and turning, replaying the moment I lost it all.
They say you can’t lose what you never had. What about things you’d only just decided you “needed” like, that day? You really shouldn’t be able to lose them, right? Because I’d more or less woken up a little bored, wanted something to be obsessive and dramatic about, saw people at Eras on Instagram, and was like, “hmm, this works.”
And so I just LAUGH. At 4 AM I laugh in delirious resignation, absorbing the lengths I’d gone to for something so non-essential. So slippery. Dia, when have you ever let some tall, skinny blonde with bangs waste your time and how is Ticketmaster even legal and you never even listened to “Gold Rush.”
Yet those fifteen hours made me feel like I was a part of something special. You kinda had to be there: on every ticket-selling page where people go above and beyond to “help a fellow Swiftie.” People who’d already attended shows and have no reason to spend their time navigating a system designed to fail, standing by on their phones, iPads, and laptops, ready to help their sisters reach the land of milk and honey. These are people who aren’t too cool to be completely obsessed with someone, especially the person who wrote the soundtrack of their lives. That is sacred. And religious types love bringing new folks to church.
–
For fifteen hours, I was a Disney adult. A high school cheerleader. A Starbucks pink drink. A Maxxinista. A Toyota Camry with headlight eyelashes. A Michael Kors purse. But I was also an icicle hanging from your porch at midnight on Christmas. The smell of fresh cinnamon rolls. Sandy from Grease when she puts on the leather jacket. And I feel more myself than ever, which is to say this was in me all along. The readiness to drop everything for pop ecstasy.
One day I’ll ride that wave of sequins, hand over my American heart screaming, “it’s a love story, baby, just say yes.”
“That is sacred. And religious types love bringing new folks to church.” OOF yeah that’s the one right there