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Europe|Swifties in Vienna Cry, Commiserate and Try to Shake It Off
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/world/europe/taylor-swift-eras-tour-vienna-reactions.html
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Taylor Swift fans from around the world grappled with disappointment and fear after a terrorism plot derailed the Vienna leg of the Eras Tour.
Aug. 8, 2024, 3:51 p.m. ET
Just as she was boarding her flight at Boston Logan International Airport headed for a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Mary DePetris excitedly checked the online fan group, Swiftie Nation.
Austrian authorities had discovered a terrorist plot targeting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the city, she read. On Wednesday, just before takeoff, organizers canceled all three shows. Ms. DePetris, 47, stepped onto the plane and broke the news to some of her fellow passengers.
“Half the plane was crying,” Ms. DePetris said. “It’s not just about the shows, it’s the community coming together and feeling safe at her concerts, and Swifties letting their guard down. And this just shifted all of that,” she said. “How can we do that now that we feel we are targeted?”
As the estimated 200,000 people who had been expected to worship at Ms. Swift’s proscenium in Vienna grappled with crushing disappointment, wasted money and a measure of fear at narrowly avoiding danger, a sea of fans flooded the baroque city looking for ways to shake it off.
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They traded Eras merchandise in the shadow of the vacant stadium, or dissolved into tears when they caught the strains of Ms. Swift’s stanzas drifting from the doorways of sympathetic gift shops or churches. Some hung handmade friendship bracelets — a treasured Swiftie talisman inspired by a song lyric — on a tree on Corneliusgasse, a central Vienna thoroughfare whose name echoes the name of Ms. Swift’s song “Cornelia Street.” There, hundreds hugged, cried and commiserated in the middle of the road.
