Making art with my hands, honestly making anything with my hands—I’ve never been about it. But with Molly’s help, I made this. I am ALLLLLLL about it.

I’m all about this, too: Four friendship bracelets when I arrived, one from Janela and three from Sadie, visible strings tying me to my communities and giving me support to boldly be a quirky middle-aged man awash in this ocean of young femininity that made the whole place shimmer. Quite literally. By the time the show started, Sadie’s “The Lakes” had been swapped for a “Fearless” band fashioned by a beaming fan (she might have been 13) whose mom told me about their family’s Mexican restaurant in Radford, Virginia. Best move all night when I made that trade. Nothing’s ever enfolded me in Swiftie community like that moment.

I made the show, too, even though many didn’t make it. So many Swifties wished they could be where we were, and I’m grateful. We were high, in the sky, with the screaming frenzy under us, and it was unquestionably a beautiful thing.

Beautiful from our price-gouged, resold, partially obstructed seats—because the secret here, the secret Swifties whispered to me through top-volume-belting EVERY SINGLE SYLLABLE for three hours, is her expert performance of Concert as Spectacle. This Spectacle offered one kind of beauty to a front-row fortunate like Burgundy Bowler Hat, who I met in a tapas restaurant tabled almost entirely to a person with eagerly anticipatory Swifties hours before the show—and who told me me where he was sitting, fittingly, as I told him how I admired his look, crisp white shirt under matching burgundy vest. But the Spectacle offers those of us up high, in the sky, an entirely different kind of beauty. Panoramic. Pulsing with light and sound. Gasping collectively with gregarious fellow feeling. Beauty that spreads and envelops and can carry the weight of many, many cities at once because we are all pushing along precisely the same vector, the titanic strength of simultaneous human striving and supplicating a palpable entity that feels, abso-freaking-lutely, like a religious experience. Burgundy Bowler Hat might have felt a part of that, but not quite the way we did, catching those feelings like when you gaze at the stars and start to feel, even on the firm, damp ground of a dark, spacious park, vertiginous—because your cognition strains to hold the astral distance that you’re sensing at last and you feel strangely like you’re falling toward the sky. Like that. That’s why Jumbotron-from-binoculars-needed-far-away can be, within the right audience and with the right performer, not simulacrum but robustly authentic musical majesty. Paul McCartney never managed at the height of the Mania to hear the secret of the Spectacle; all he could hear was cacophony in the screaming frenzy. But she hears hymn. She invokes the spirit. She exhorts us, sometimes in stage patter and always in her approach, to feel every syllable in our lungs, to inhale her music and breathe it with every sinew back into the air so that we can keep living together, as one body, in this immense space.

Beautiful to offer that to her as a way to reciprocate what she offers us. We were astonished at her vigor this night, the second of a three-night stand, a three-hour marathon spanning her famously sundry styles. But that was nothing next to what she offered others the following, final night: Taking the stage at 10:30, delayed by storms, having six hours of show still living in her body over the previous fifty hours, and then performing her full set, amid the deluge, striding confidently along the runway stage, executing lightning-fast costume changes minutes after the lightning itself had abated, putting across every note live, holding 70,000 drenched people gently at the end of her astonishingly charismatic, magically self-mocking and wry and funny and warmly invitational string, just as she had done with us the night before, until 1:30 in the morning. I mean, my god. My favorite story as a fan of the band Rush (yes, teen boys who obsess over Rush do indeed become fifty-something Swifties) is Geddy Lee’s Yiddish-accented grandmother, after many years of baffled trivializing of the young fellow’s eschewing education for that horrible, loud music, finally seeing him perform with his wildly successful act and saying in sudden joyful recognition, “Ohhhhhhh, I seeeee…he’s an en-tah-TAY-nah!!!” The star on stage last weekend in Nashville, to put the matter in dramatic and punning and awestruck understatement, is without any question, if ever there was one, an all-time, Mount-Rushmore-level, legendary En-Tah-TAY-Nah.

Beautiful to hear these songs I know so well offered in a fresh frame. These songs that live always in my head because of her extraordinary skill at quirking the quotidian, her extraordinary skill at poeticizing the plea—gathering her own striving to live and inviting us to live with her in the striving. “I hope you think of me” she wished on her very first single…I think of her, and with her, and in her fashion, constantly these days because of her writing. The fashion of “Out of the Woods” as it lived in my head before Tay Day was the slickest, brightest, most pulverizing pop, music with a style definitely befitting its video of impossibly unreal CGI quasi-beach-scapes (where it was almost snowing even then) and quasi-hell-forests in which she writhed like a wolf. Yet I love this song and always feel like something differently beautiful than pop luster lurks within it…and she sure-footedly brought that different beauty out for us by playing it on an acoustic guitar, not quite solo because she asked us to help her sing the simple chorus. She flubbed the bridge, my favorite part, a fortunate folly that led to her whirling her whip of charm around us, replaying from there to the end and also proclaiming her right, distinct from surprise acoustic songs played flawlessly on other nights, to thereby get to play it again on the tour.

Beautiful above all because we Swifties found fellowship in one another. We didn’t just shake hands in suits in pews; we swapped bracelets and gaggled glee and shared stories—a woman older than me walking across the pedestrian bridge with her 20-something, very quiet, daughter, reminiscing about the two of them winning a contest years ago and getting to meet, in a group of maybe thirty people, The Queen (the day before our show some fellow named Charles did something newsworthy, I hear, but all of us in that audience recognize who The Queen is and were glad to be in this giant building with her). The mother noted how nice she was to both of them when they met her. She identified her daughter as autistic and honored my sharing a business card, in the hopes of an interview, by kindly commenting on how rare it is for her daughter to talk at all, as she was talking on that walk across the bridge, to a stranger like me. Like Me—The most beautiful thing of all was how many there were like me—sure, some men in my demographic disavowed by paradoxical avowal, wearing shirts like “It’s me…hi…I’m the Dad, it’s me” and so on, but just as many others quite obviously marked themselves like I did, careful to be read as Swifties—Swifties as fervent, as dedicated, as any young girl. Like the two muscular men with tees stretched over their chiseled pecs and bulging biceps who I met outside the restaurant. At any other time and place, with stretched tees adorned not with TS lyrics as these shirts were but with biker symbols, I would have hailed these fellows as defining themselves apart from me. On this day, though, we three hailed one another with convivial smiles and then—and then!!!—one of them regaled me with his profound belief that the artist we were there to witness is the modern-day singer-songwriter heir of Bob Dylan, and to further regale me with his insistence that all Bobcats need to be busy being born again as Swifties if they want to hear his legacy carried forward. Uhhhh, my friend…in me, you have met your people.

On this day, I made the show, and I used my hands to make powerful connections, and I made something new in my life that is about music. About learning. About spectacle. About vertigo. About community. And being a Swiftie For Life? I’m ALLLLLLL about it.

Photos and videos: Molly Hazelwood