After “Cruel Summer,” Swift-miming incredulity that all these people are here to see her, like, what?!?-tells her audience that they make her feel “so powerful” toward the end of the concert, she claims to feel a little guilty that her audience has to endure just one last song (OMG sorry!). She does a lot of the aw-shucks-who- me?! shtick that she has been plying forever, which was charming when she was a teen-ager, became grating and fake within a few years, and now scans as impeccable commitment to the bit. My colleague Amanda Petrusich has written that Swift’s fans connect with her so passionately in part because of the star’s “ ‘you guys’ energy, a chatty, ersatz intimacy.” The “Eras” movie bottles this exact vibe, presenting Swift much like a single gal out for her birthday, and she’s invited seventy thousand of her closest friends, and it just happens to be her turn at the karaoke mike. ![]() The costume, like the concert and the movie, moved deftly back and forth in Taylor time, in a spirit of fastidious reverence. The filmgoers had drawn pink glitter hearts around their eyes in honor of the “Lover” promo art and stacked friendship bracelets up to their elbows in homage to a lyric in “You’re on Your Own, Kid.” One woman mixed and matched her Swifts, pairing her frilly, moss-green “folklore” dress with the fuzzy jacket from the “Lavender Haze” video and underlining the ’fit with a pair of “Fearless”-vintage cowgirl boots. Inside the movie-theatre lobby-where I purchased a ten-dollar “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” water cup for each of the girls and a thirteen-dollar “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” bucket of popcorn for them to share-we joined mothers and daughters, groups of women in their twenties, young gay couples, and one elderly straight couple who wanted our little squad to know that “Taylor writes all her own music.” The scene was a Swiftian Ren Faire: we saw approximations of the cheerleader outfit from the “Shake It Off” video, the Magic Markered-up T-shirt from “You Belong with Me,” the black sequined hoodie-leotard from the “Reputation” tour, and a plenitude of the shimmery, sparkly floor-length gowns that exemplify Swift’s Rodarte-meets-Chasing Fireflies aesthetic. I could only give my kid a new home I needed Taylor Swift to help her find her people. The house of Swift offered scripture in the form of song lyrics and vestments in the form of concert merch and friendship bracelets it provided the social glue of communal devotion. I had missed the deadline to sign the kids up for soccer. In the late summer, I moved with my family to a new town, where we don’t know anybody, and, within a couple weeks of school starting, my daughter, until then a casual listener of “ Midnights,” had been recruited as a militant Swiftie. Even the greenest Swifties know, on some intuitive level, that they are being played, and they are happy to play along-not least because they have so many friends to play with. The girls’ analysis of Swift-Kelce distills key aspects of the junior-Swiftie mind-set, both in its chaste wish-casting ( flash back to circa-2009 Taylor, sitting on the bleachers awaiting her shot with the football star) and in its nuanced acknowledgment that Swift, as one of my passengers said, is the “greatest businesswoman”: a savvy, even sly architect of her brand, yes, but fundamentally an honest broker. ![]() And, sure enough, the very next night, after Swift and Kelce made separate cameos on “Saturday Night Live,” paparazzi caught them leaving the after-party hand in hand. By eavesdropping on the back-seat chatter of my daughter and her fellow-Swifties, and later asking my kid some follow-up questions, I learned that Taylor and Travis, who is a “national football player,” are “just friends for now- for now,” and that, while Taylor did “get all the people talking” about a purported romance to drum up publicity for the “Eras” movie, she and Kelce are indeed going to start dating “for real” very soon. ![]() But then, on Friday night, I drove a group of fourth-grade girls to a Connecticut mall to see the movie “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which earned nearly a hundred million dollars at the North America weekend box office, becoming the highest-grossing concert film of all time. I was struggling to sort fact, fiction, and rumor when it came to the Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce relationship.
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