How my family ended up seeing TWO Taylor Swift concerts in Rio
Note: If you’ve read this post about my family’s trip to Rio de Janeiro, the following explains how we ended up seeing Taylor Swift on back-to-back nights.
The original concert tickets I purchased back in June were for the Saturday show. A week or so before we flew to Rio, I checked the long-term weather forecast and saw trouble: lightning on Saturday night.
Not wanting to travel all that way only to have the Saturday show canceled or rescheduled to a day outside our travel dates, I checked the price on tickets for Sunday. Tickets for the standing area by the stage (the same tickets I’d purchased for Saturday) were $65. I decided to buy 4 tickets as a backup plan/insurance policy.
I wasn’t really planning to go to two shows. In fact, after I bought the backup tickets, I reached out to our contacts at Make-A-Wish Oregon and asked if they could get in touch with the Rio de Janeiro office of Make-A-Wish Americas.
One thing people don’t know about Make-A-Wish is that in addition to the amazing wishes they grant to send kids and families to places like Disneyland (or in our case New York City for a Broadway show), the local chapters keep in touch with the families and often offer them access to cool local events and experiences. For example, my family has been hooked up with tickets to see the Portland Timbers. Even more memorably, Make-A-Wish was the group that arranged for Sabina to sing the national anthem at a minor-league baseball game back when she was still undergoing chemo.
My thinking was that our backup tickets to see Taylor Swift might make for a great experience for a Wish family based in Rio. In the event that the Saturday show was canceled and we actually needed to use the Sunday tickets, I figured I’d use the StubHub credit from the canceled tickets to buy another set of Sunday tickets.
Despite their best efforts, the Make-A-Wish team was unable to connect with any families in Rio. In the end, that might have been for the best. With all the heat and rain and so much uncertainty surrounding the concerts, I would have felt terrible subjecting a Wish family to all that chaos.
I hadn’t even told my wife Kate about the extra tickets until the flight to Rio, but when Saturday’s show was postponed, she agreed my Plan B would become our Plan A and we’d try to attend both shows.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can selfishly confess I am glad we went to both shows. As I previously explained, each night was unique and provided a lifetime of different memories. Paired together, they were simply spectacular.
Note: If you’ve read this much about my family’s journey, please consider doing what you can to help Make-A-Wish Oregon. Sabina has been a Wish Ambassador during 2023 and has been raising money throughout this year. She has already exceeded her goal, but there’s no such thing as raising too much money for such an awesome organization.
If you’ve just stumbled on this post and want to learn more about my family’s trip to Rio to see Taylor Swift, you can read about our special motivation to go on the trip, a recap of our magical week and an update about how our lives changed shortly after we returned.
Sean McMahon is the Director of Content at SmartBrief. He is also the editor of the While You Were Working newsletter.
