Fran Magazine: Issue #65

The Eras Tour issue

You’re reading Fran Magazine, a Substack by Fran Hoepfner, who is me. This issue is for paying, free, and non-subscribers alike, but any support you can pledge goes a long way, both financially and emotionally. Thank you!

Meadowlands

There was a chicken tender shortage on Sunday night at the Eras Tour. This might not mean anything to you, and it might not mean anything to me, but it meant something to a lot of people who were eager to eat chicken tenders. Not unlike going to the airport, I have never believed in getting any kind of “legitimate” food in a stadium setting — for all I am tempted by whatever Yankee Stadium sushi tastes like, I will always eat a hot dog. In turn, it was not worth seeking out a different food stand for a different kind of cuisine. I was already in the line.

It’s important to note that there was not a dearth of chicken tenders: it was just that the frying took a minute, and the bigger deep fryers were being allocated for French fries and the smaller ones for tenders. But everyone in line wanted tenders, which came with fries. “It’ll be five or six minutes,” the cashiers were telling everyone for chicken tenders. This sounds reasonable in isolation, perhaps, but imagine you are six parties back in line, and that everyone agrees to wait five or six minutes for the tenders. Not to mention: there are seven or eight lines in which this scenario is taking place at the same food plaza. You can start to see what is happening. I won’t paint myself a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but if you tell me I am going to have to wait either twenty minutes for one food or no minutes for several other kinds of food, you best believe I am getting a hot dog.

Still: the situation escalated. As a former food service employee, I am always compelled by breakdowns in kitchens — what the hold up is, who is at fault. I don’t mean this in a punitive way; it’s just interesting. By my amateur estimation, and as stated earlier, the issue with the chicken tender shortage and subsequent slowdown was that there were big deep fryers and small deep fryers, and the big deep fryers were being allocated towards French fries and the small deep fryers were being allocated towards the tenders. This makes sense: you are always going to need more fries than you do chicken tenders. In an attempt to rectify the chicken tender shortage, they switched the deep fryer bins: now the tenders were being produced in bulk, and the fries less so. I’m sure you can predict what happened next: they ran out of fries. They also, to my dismay, ran out of hot dog buns. And slices of pizza. Perhaps the issue was not with the kitchen, but volume of consumer in general.

It was hard not to spend this time in line considering forthcoming and present-day climate change-motivated food shortages, and the ways in which the majority of people will choose to go with what makes them most comfortable at the expense of others’ time and energy. I am not sure why most of the Swifties in line did not want a hot dog, which I don’t consider a less “legitimate” food than a chicken tender. But that’s just me.

Addressing the Swiftie allegations

In regaling friends and acquaintances with stories of the Eras tour, I have been met with two hands’ worth of “no offense, but I didn’t think you care about Taylor Swift.” That’s fair, though many forget I have preternaturally bad taste in contemporary music.

I am a late in life Taylor Swift fan, and my favorite albums are often much-derided (1989, Lover). The first album of hers I ever listened to was Red, which I “discovered” the year after it came out — the year I was 22 — and then went through the country-adjacent back catalog only to discover that it wasn’t really for me. 1989, however, came out in the throes of what was starting to feel like the beginning of my life: a “real job” (emails job) that I worked at from home, a “real relationship” (girlfriend who did not introduce me as a friend at parties), all the while starting to publish film criticism and thinking about writing not only as a passion project but viable way to occasionally make $50. Not unlike Rihanna’s Talk That Talk, 1989 was an album I listened to, mostly, while traveling: the fall of 2014 took me to Belgium, for a critics’ workshop in Ghent, where I walked from the hostel to the multiplex a mile each way, listening to 1989. Later, in 2019, Lover bolstered me through a string of bad dating experiences, culminating in a solo trip to Banff where I hiked and sang and drove around before going to Sonia’s wedding. What does it say about me that I only like Taylor Swift when I’m far from home?

Other albums I like — Red, sort of, and Reputation, a lot — and more I tolerate — folklore, Evermore, Midnights, though the latter two are growing on me the way the first one never did. I like when Swift’s music is stupid; I suspect she likes it more too. I have no patience for the ten minute long All Too Well, but I get what she’s going for as a creative exercise.

I was hard on her celebrity during my tenure at Gawker, because I suspect, not incorrectly, probably, that her celebrity is net evil and that she has perpetuated far more harm than she has good. That said, watching both the performance of the Eras tour and her Sundance documentary from a few years ago have convinced me her life is pretty sad, if not outright pathetic. I pity her, but I think she wants that. She made a comment about the way in which making semi-autobiographical work weighs heavy while performing night after night. As much as I love Lover, it makes sense — given the dissolution of her relationship with popular celebrity Joe Alwyn — that she would cut back on the presence of that album, despite this being the first tour with it. Still: no Cornelia Street, no Paper Rings, no London Boy? (lol) Kind of a bummer!

The breakdown of whatever did or didn’t happen with her and Healy does not make a lot of sense to me, but Gossip Time x Hung Up cleared much of that up. I did not really care beyond the fact that I thought it was interesting that Swift was dating a guy who seemed annoying and that a lot of other women were always mad about — maybe the most relatable thing she’s done in years.

In the mouth of madness

Blythe and I made our way out to MetLife around two in the afternoon, knowing the stadium opened around 4:30pm and not knowing what exactly to expect once we were there. It was easy and funny to follow the leads of much more sparkly, pastel cowboy hat-wearing types from Penn Station out to Secaucus and then to the Meadowlands, as well as a nice opportunity to sing the praises of NJ Transit, who handed out custom wristbands.

I would guess the median age at the concert was 21 or 22, but what do I know. It is funny to imagine someone whose first Taylor Swift album was, like, 1989, but that’s true of me as well. There were a lot of people who did not fit the “Swiftie demo,” e.g. tattooed guys with their goth girlfriends, exhausted dads, women fifteen to twenty years my senior. Maybe these are Swifties to you, but not to me.

We pooled into the stadium and then waited an hour in line for merch (what else are you supposed to do) before Blythe went to see Phoebe Bridgers and I observed the chicken tender fiasco. In the midst of trying to do calculus to determine why everyone was agreeing to wait a few minutes for chicken tenders, I tried to eavesdrop on a whisper argument occurring behind me in line between a teenager girl and her mom. The source of irritation reached a normal volume speaking voice breaking point when the mom went, “You need to just ask her.” Now I was implicated in this? I turned when one of them touched my arm. “My daughter wants to know if your tattoo is Frances the Badger,” the mom asked. She was right, though I am often asked if it is the University of Wisconsin mascot.

Back in the seats, dead center but very high up, we sat behind two pairs of girls, all four of whom displayed fascinating behavior. The two girls sitting directly in front of us alternated which of the two of them held both of their phones: one tasked with filming the concert and filming the other girl dancing to the concert. The phoneless girl would get to enjoy the concert without the burden of technology until they would inevitably swap parts, like when Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller did Frankenstein like that every night. The other girls were much young, late middle or early high school, who were prone to scream-singing not only with Swift but also with Bridgers, which is surprising to me I guess only because it’s hard to imagine someone who is not a 25 year old listening to Phoebe Bridgers. The other thing they spent a lot of the concert doing was filming themselves not in selfie mode, but with their phones flipped and the flashlight feature on, so they appeared in spotlight scream-singing Swift’s songs. If either of them got any actual footage of Swift, it would be news to me.

I am not much of a scream-singer myself, and I am mostly horrified by all public acts of singing which is why no one can ever get me to show up at karaoke. Concerts are a point of simultaneous pressure and anxiety, though I am comforted by the realization that no one is paying much attention to me. Still, I could not stop thinking about the two girls filming themselves, having this intense emotional reaction and then choosing to document it for whatever reason beyond, like, posterity. (I haven’t read the article about Swifties claiming some degree of amnesia about Eras tour; maybe a series of self-filmed videos of singing and crying would help jog a memory or two.) I am not inclined to have any intense emotional reaction I’ve ever had to anything documented for posterity. It’s hard to think of something more mortifying. I have memories, no doubt, of scream-singing in the car with friends or crying to One Direction on the brown line, but to know that intensity of feeling could be repeated — sort of feels like that episode of Black Mirror where Toby Kebbell says “Mr. Marrakesh?” like one hundred times while rewinding the scene of his wife talking to a guy at a party.

I feel similarly about crying selfies, or whatever the Hadids are always on about, and this vague attempt to deinfluence an enviable lifestyle. I guess I just don’t buy it, even from regular people. Documentation of crying is still a performance of tragedy — this is basically the Taylor Swift ethos in a nutshell! The concert was so fun and engaging and strange and sometimes beautiful, but I was only ever moved to the point of light, light tears at Swift’s rendition of Lover, a great song, oft-maligned for stupid lyrics (what else is new). To it hear loudly, which is to say correctly, emphasized its sadness, its wistfulness. I think Swift is a performer at heart, but rarely a liar: she is not a good enough actor to convince me otherwise. I was touched, the moment staying with me in an internal, buried sort of way. No one will know how I looked when I felt it, how thought crossed my brow. How feeling is made literal. Unless, of course, the girls in front of me got it on video.

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Thank you to Blythe Roberson for bringing me along on the Eras tour. <333