My daughter Imogen and I got into Taylor Swift at the same time. It was “You Need to Calm Down” that got us: Imogen and Winter, just five, squealed with excitement and danced to the song in their princess dresses. This was pre-COVID, and the artist’s technicolor vision buoyed us during the pandemic that would end our time in Juneau, Alaska; too much isolation on top of too much gray. It’s interesting that now, after that hard time, the girls dancing to that song is what I remember.
We’ve lived in two different houses in two different states since COVID, and Taylor is still our favorite. At my niece’s NYE birthday sleepover our first year in Wisconsin, my brother reported the sleepover guests changed outfits for every era of the Eras Tour as they watched it. They did it again at our house a couple of weeks later. We personally know four people who have been to the Eras Tour, Irie and Fern in Chicago and Liv and Ollie in New York. We’ve even seen a video taken from inside.
Taylor’s music has meant so much to us over the years. When we first moved to California, The Tortured Poets Department had just been released, and we didn’t have any friends in the area yet. Ansel and Imogen and I would listen to that album back and forth from the beach, over and over again, as though it were our job to memorize it. Ansel’s favorite song was “Florida.” I think Immy’s favorite is “Down Bad” because of the sanctioned swearing it involves.
F**k it if you can’t take a joke
By the time Life of a Showgirl came out, we were primed. Imogen learned the dance from “Fate of Ophelia” the first time she saw the video and laboriously taught it to Ansel, who has been with us with Taylor since he put on his first pair of fairy wings during the “You Need to Calm Down” days. When the song was chosen in the play they did this spring, A Tangled Mess: A Rapunzel Story, Imogen was able to lead the group on stage mostly because she knew the song so well.
When she started fourth grade in California, some kids asked why her new backpack was “dirty” and she’d asked me to return it, but she’d held her head high. For the class wax museum project, she’d dressed up as Taylor Alison Swift, in “Lover” leotard, nylons and heels, complete with her cat, Benjamin Button. “Questioners” (dressed up as Lainey Wilson and Simone Biles) be damned, Imogen said her monologue 113 times and made the yearbook.
When I picked her up from school that day, her nylons had been ripped to shreds and she had dirt on her face. The class had been asked to take a hike after all the wax museum and she had tripped and fallen and tumbled down a hill. No one from the school had called me, even though I had been asked to make a separate trip to come and get Ansel for a 99-degree fever.
I hadn’t collected Imogen at the time the school requested (demanded?) I got Ansel because I thought she was having fun, when what she was doing was steeling herself. I wish it didn’t have to happen to her so often at such a young age, but part of being a mom is making the world seem more of a, to borrow a term from my old friend, herself the mom of Irie and Fern in their glitter at the Eras Tour in Chicago, for whose tickets their dad had given up a day to refresh his screen, “hunky-dory” place than it really is.
Starting this very document, I came across one called “Chattin with Tay-Tay” which is just an image of Taylor Imogen had copied and pasted into a blank Google Doc, and I remembered when I had had to tell her the email address might not go to Taylor herself. Just a few days ago, I had been deciding what would be the best way to spend our last day together before the kids went to Mexico with their dad for ten days, when Imogen very excitedly reported that Toy Story 5 (featuring the new Taylor single) was out.
We made it a plan, Ansel going along with it although I think he’d’ve preferred Sheep Detectives, and got them all packed up for their trip before leaving for her orthodontist appointment, the movie, and then dropping them off to begin their trip and our longest time apart to date. At the orthodontist, she let Ansel and me choose her colors for her braces bands. I had to tell Imogen that, even though Taylor does have a song in the movie, she would not be at the theater.
I approached the theater doors to find my daughter lightly kicking a small songbird out of the way, into the flowers. It must have flown into the glass, but it was the way she wasn’t surprised of this casualty of this not-perfect world; the care with which she did it but also the grace and almost nonchalance: what looks like sky is actually just a reflection of sky. The closest you might come to your hero is seeing her name in the credits. You can fall down in the mud, and, even though you are dressed as Taylor Alison Swift, as a matter of fact, have been her all day, still no one may offer a hand to help you up.
“Who does she want to see?” the box office worker asked.
“Taylor Swift,” I replied.
“Oh,” he said, looking around at the mostly-empty theater. Had I been holding out hope with her?
He handed us our buttered popcorn and then sat down to his own laptop and started eating an apple, but we didn’t really notice, because
Our song is the slamming screen door
Sneakin’ out late, tapping on your window
Asking God if he could play it again
AngelfromMontgomery et al. 