Day 14: From Taylor Swift Concert to Chaos - 30 days, 30 episodes

Matt Gilhooly
00:00:01

I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is the Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello, my friends.

Welcome to day 14 of 30 days, 30 episodes on the Life Shift podcast.

This is a bonus series in which every day, not ahead of time, but every day after work or on the weekends, I show up, I look at a list of prompts, and I respond to it. And so, pretty much every time I come in to do this recording, I don't know what I'm going to talk about.

I try to think about it, and then I just don't know.

And so sometimes it comes spur of the moment, like yesterday's Day 13, in which I pretty much confessed my body image issues and food addiction type issues and the things that I've struggled with since I was a kid. And so that was a lot. And I think it was important, but it was a lot. And so hopefully you made it through and it wasn't too much for you or.

I don't think it's too much information. I think it's just part of being a human and admitting that we all probably have flaws, and maybe that's not a flaw.

Maybe that's just part of the human condition. Anyway, so Today is day 14, so I thought maybe it would be a little bit lighter and talk about a particular moment that I had at a concert.

It was a very memorable concert.

And So I think 2018, my best friend Tracy and I decided that we were gonna go to the Reputation tour for Taylor Swift down in Miami, and we were gonna make a weekend out of it, and we were gonna go visit my friend Brian and hang out for a little bit. And then we were going to go to the concert. And I think it would be her first current version of Taylor Swift concert.

I think maybe she saw Taylor back when Taylor was a teenager opening for people, but this was a whole spectacle.

And I wasn't a huge Taylor Swift fan until one of my former students after graduation, obviously called me up and said, hey, have an extra ticket to the 1989 tour. Do you want to go with me? And I was like, sure, why not? Let's go.

And so I went, and I was just kind of blown away by the whole experience and, like, how smart Taylor Swift is and the show that she puts on. And so I was, like, kind of hooked. And maybe I don't love all the songs, but I like a lot of them now.

And I'm just always forever impressed by the concerts that she puts on. So in 2018, we had the opportunity to go to the Reputation tour. And so Tracy and I got our stuff together. We made shirts, so we each had tank tops.

And one of us had Gorgeous on our shirt, and then the other one had delicate on our shirt. And we wore that at the show. And that was about as decked out as we got for this particular concert. But it was down in Miami, so it was hot.

So we had to make sure that we were. We were good to go. And so we went to the concert. It was a great concert and we enjoyed a lot of it, all of it.

We were actually surprised how much we liked the opening acts. And we're really into what was going on there. So anyway, went to the concert. It was in Miami.

So this is at, I believe, the Hard Rock Stadium of some sort down in Miami. And this stadium is not like in the nicest of areas. And we weren't too aware of that.

I mean, I guess we kind of knew, but then we made a lot of assumptions in which kind of backfired a little bit.

So to get there, my friend Brian drove us there and he dropped us off, and so we were like, okay, cool, we're going to do the concert and then we will get an Uber. And clearly that'll be simple. We'll just get an Uber and we'll take the Uber back to my friend Brian's house in Miami.

And so we get out of the show and we try to figure out the Uber and it's like, here's the Uber lot. There's a million Ubers showing up. You gotta walk all this distance. And we're like, I don't.

Let's just walk a little bit outside of the stadium and then get an Uber and like, just get away from the traffic, because there was just so much traffic. And so we did and we started walking and like, nobody is accepting the Ubers or the lifts or any of those kind of things.

And it was just like we could. It was like, how far are we going to have to walk? This is 11 o'clock at night or something. I don't know, maybe close to midnight.

How far are we going to have to walk in the not nicest of neighborhoods? And we don't know the neighborhood, we don't know which direction to go and why we would go that direction over a different direction.

So we just kept going and trying to find them. And then people would accept, and I guess when they would get stuck in the traffic, they would decline the pickup.

And then the skies opened up and it was a torrential downpour. Of course, we did not have umbrellas. We did not have ponchos. We did not have anything but ourselves and our phones.

And here we are in the scariest of neighborhoods, and I'm giggling about it now. But it was quite frightening because we were drenched. We had nowhere to go. There was no way to get a ride.

And we're trying and trying and trying, and we're standing in some, like, residential neighborhood, standing in front of someone's house, like, under their tree, trying to get a little bit of protection from the rain. And then they came out of their house and like, hey, you want to stand in our garage? And we're like, we don't. Like, this is just.

All of this is scary, and we don't know what we're doing right now. So, needless to say, I was frightened. And I tried to, like, be as not frightened on the outside as possible.

But I think if you were to ask Tracy, she probably saw it, and she probably knew how frightened I was, and she probably was as well. And then it made me think of, like, what kind of friend am I to make her be out in this situation as well?

Of course, I didn't know that it was going to be torrential downpour or that it was going to take forever to try to find a safe way out. So eventually, someone accepted our pickup request. And they pull up, and we are soaked, and the guy is, like. Looks at us like.

Like he didn't know what to say. Like, it was just. And we're like, please, we will. You know, we won't even sit on your seats. We'll sit on the floor behind your seats, and we won't.

We'll try not touch anything. I know we're soaked, but we just, like, have nowhere to go, and we just need to get back. And he was so kind.

He let us in to his car, and we sat on the floorboards behind those seats.

So don't tell any cops that we were not buckled up, but we just huddled there and froze our butts off soaking wet on the floorboards of this gentleman's car.

And turns out this was his last pickup, and he was on his way home north, and we had to go south, so he had to go all the way the opposite direction to drop us off.

Needless to say, we gave him a great tip and thanked him just, like, from beginning to end and got back into my friend Brian's, a condo, and cleaned up and just thought, wow, like, we survived that. And it was a lot. But if we look at it now we laugh about it because we survived it.

And it really made that night memorable in ways that were not expected because the concert itself was really good. But I hardly remember that because of the events that came after that.

So that's probably one of, like, the scariest moments that I've been in in a situation in which I didn't have as much control as I thought maybe going into it I would have. So it makes me a little apprehensive sometimes still when I go to situations, I have to kind of know what the game plan is, going in, going out.

And now that I've had this experience, it makes me a little bit more cautious to make sure that I have a good understanding of, like, the safety afterwards.

So I guess the moral of the story is to make sure that if you're ever going to the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, that you have a game plan to get in and out. And maybe that's a private driver. You bring your own car. Maybe that is some other safer route.

There was recently a concert down there, and I was reading a couple posts on social media in which people had very similar situations. So maybe the stadium needs to figure that piece out because it was quite an adventure. But it does.

It makes a really memorable story and something that Tracy and I can still talk about and laugh about.

There are some pictures, and so if she allows me, you'll see the episode artwork of the picture of us in the backseat of that very kind gentleman's Uber. But in any case, there's my story for you.

It is a little adventure that I took with my friend Tracy when we went to Taylor Swift's Reputation tour in Miami in 2018. We've done a lot of other cool things, and maybe I'll end up sharing those sometime this month, but that is day 14.

Thank you for coming on this journey. Make sure you know how you're going to get in and out of any event that you go to, and be safe out there. I will talk to you guys tomorrow on day 15.

For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.