My Mother Received a Mysterious Taylor Swift Call
At 5 in the morning
In Spain, December 28th was Día de los Santos Inocentes, what we call Holy Innocents’ Day, which has an apocryphal origin in the massacre of children by Herod the Great, a story found in the Gospel of Matthew. It is celebrated in Spain much like we celebrate April Fool’s Day — Spaniards are known for their dark humor. But though our uncle’s house in Spain was full of people, not a single prank was played, no high jinks transpired, no one was duped, and — this can’t be a coincidence — not a single excellent joke was made all day.
But the nighttime was a different story. I was sharing a bed with my mother in the hallway, really just a foam pad laid next to the restroom. At around five in the morning, she received a group call from three unknown numbers, all with Los Angeles area codes. She answered the call, and immediately the three voices started singing the Taylor Swift song Style. In a precisely-arranged three part harmony complete with counterpoint, we heard the chorus of the song:
’Cause you got that James Dean daydream look in your eye
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
’Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style
My mom began fumbling with her phone and smashing her fingers against the screen, loudly whispering “stop! Please, stop!” She was flopping her hand ineffectually against the screen, trying and failing to end our private serenade. I grabbed the phone from her. I thought: “this makes absolutely no sense.” And I thought: “this is such a good song.” And then: “this is an exquisite performance, given that they’re calling from three different phones and need to coordinate across the call’s time lag.” I hung up.
Colleagues, I’m not mad but I am impressed. How can I explain this? What reason is there to do this to someone? What trio of young girls decided that proving mastery of the vocal arts requires an immaculate three voice performance of a Taylor Swift song for total strangers? If this incident has happened to you or a loved one, please let me know. Together — only together can we get to the bottom of this unfathomable mystery.
