About last night…

I need to calm down

So…

…yeah…

…about last night…

Time. Our friend, our foe.
T.Swizzle sings 22.
This is 56.

So yeah. Last night I went to see TayTay’s Eras Tour at Soldier Field. Today I’m riding the high of it as any self-respecting middle-aged person would…full of adrenaline but overtired and completely bleary eyed at O’Hare, about to jump on a conference call before I board my flight and go home to work all day before turning it around and heading out tomorrow midday on a business trip for the rest of the week. To that bright and shining booming metropolis known as…Baltimore.

The concert was amazing. T.Swizz is a genius. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it again and I’ll stand by my position with anyone who says otherwise, holding my ground against the haters. She is writing and recording new music while re-recording her catalog to take back rights to it. She’s sociopolitically aware and active and vocal. She means business. And unless you live under a rock you know what kind of unprecedented frenzy ticket sales to this tour set off…so just being there at all seems like some small musical miracle. (P.S. If you haven’t, you need to watch Miss Americana on Netflix. If you love her, watching it will make you love her more…if you like her it will make you love her, and if you don’t like her (the horror), watching will at least make you better understand all the fuss…if not convert you to fandom.)

This tour is a monumental event in American pop culture history, and I got to be a part of it yesterday. But this post isn’t about the concert.

It’s about friendship. And it’s about music.

If you know me, you know I believe that music is the strongest connective tissue among people there is. And the friendship that is the focus of this bit is proof of that.

A lot of people have a lot of easy friendships. By that I mean they have a lot of active friendships due to proximity and convenience and commonality of circumstance. I know when people move to new places or have personal and professional commitments, a lot of their primary friendships revolve around those activities. I have some friendships that revolve around and are rooted in those things too. But some of my most important friendships are the opposite of easy, and I mean that in the absolute best possible way. The “hard” friendships are the ones that withstand the occasional (and occasionally brutal) battering and bruising that circumstances and time and and distance and life situations throw at them, ebbing and flowing, sometimes persisting, sometimes simply existing, sometimes easily, sometimes stubbornly…but they’re always there and they’re always important…and in the case of the particular friendship I am focusing on now, they do this across several decades.

And these hard friendships are the ones I am proudest of. Because they are reflective of, in my opinion, a rare level of commitment and patience and respect and love. They’re the friendships that could have easily fallen by the wayside if it weren’t for the simple fact that they actually couldn’t. Because no matter what, we wouldn’t let them.

In the case in point, we met by sharing circumstance (college classmates, overlapping friend groups), got put into a physically proximal position due to sharing unfortunate circumstances (shitty room draw numbers but able to get a good suite if we joined up with a pair from the aforementioned overlapping friend group), and became emotionally and socially proximal upon moving in and discovering our shared love of mid-80s alt-rock. Think The Smiths. The Cure. New Order. Not the typical mainstream music heard echoing in cement and metal common spaces and stairwells at that time.

While we couldn’t be more different in so many ways, this shared love of music allowed us to explore other similarities, rooted in shared values, namely irreverent senses of humor and exceedingly low tolerances for the ridiculous and preposterous.

Lately we’d been lamenting how overdue we were for an in-person visit. We hadn’t seen each other since September of 2020, when there was a little lull with Covid, when we thought maybe it was breaking, and travel was less ill-advised…so we did a quick long-weekend escape. Since then, nothing in 3D. So when a few weeks after that, just before Memorial Day, I got the text message asking if I wanted to come to Chicago and be her +1 at the concert, I took full advantage of my first in-person meeting with my new boss the next day and got approval to work a wonky schedule today while I make my way back home.

So Saturday morning I hopped on a plane and the rest is history.

At the show when T.Swizz was singing 22, we were singing like we were 22.

Which got us thinking back to when we actually were 22, namely when we saw ’Til Tuesday in concert at The Paradise on New Year’s Eve…the night the 80s gave way to the 90s. (At least I think that’s when it was but whether I’m right or wrong, just let me have my memory this way. There may be a ticket stub somewhere in a box in my attic…and there definitely aren’t any pictures. God knows the iPhone wasn’t even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye at that the time and if we had brought a camera with us I’m pretty sure it would have ended up in a toilet…or in some shrubbery that was doing double-duty as one.)

I know the next day we went to brunch at her friend Sydney’s place (RIP, Syd…a good one taken way too soon…f-ck cancer). We were really hungover and as we drove through the city in the beige Toyota Tercel wagon we ran over a discarded Christmas tree…which got lodged under the chassis and we dragged it for blocks. My stomach hurts now from just remembering how hard we laughed.

Anyhow when the song ended I took a moment to soak it all in. The music, the show, the spectacle, the love. Some 35+ years since we met, there we were, dancing and singing like we were 22 but with all the benefit and advantage and wisdom that comes with not being 22 anymore…but still…next to each other, the music and the experience shining a spotlight on our friendship…in all its complicated unlikeliness, in all its joy. Sharing the experience of The Eras Tour gave me a renewed appreciation of the eras of our friendship and I find something comforting in the analogy. Viewing the experience as a celebration of the journey made it something beyond a night of a lifetime, but rather a life-affirming one. (And worth getting only 4 hours of sleep and waking up feeling like 122 (typing this as I stand in line at McDonald’s) today.)

The concert was amazing and confirmed Taylor Swift’s genius. But the experience also confirmed for me the great joy that is found in friendships between two people who have never given up on each other.

Thanks for sticking with me here. Have a great week.

Love you too.