2023 was supposed to be the year we got serious again. Post-Covid “revenge spending” on vacations and other things denied by the pandemic would level off. We’d supposedly gotten our travel ya-yas out in 2022, when rage over flight delays rippled around the world. Amid recession fears, we’d go back to the office.
Well, never mind all that. Instead, 2023 turned into the year when we wanted more — more fun, more travel and more entertainment. It’s the year we wanted to gather with our loved ones and our friends, both old and new.
It was the year of the party.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover that even many of our 2023 political scandals had touches of joie de vivre about them.
I’m sure you’ve got your stories about when you knew something was different about 2023. I’ve certainly got mine. There was the day in March I saw a man stop two women on a New York City street corner and ask them for directions to a bar — and within a moment all three were heading off there together. Or maybe it was the time a friend invited me to a Fourth of July weekend gathering in another city and I decided to fly in for it — only to discover so many of us had traveled from hundreds of miles away for her house party that the hostess rented a suite of hotel rooms for us.
So many people journeyed — often in groups — across the country to see Taylor Swift in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago that the Eras Tour acted as a mini economic stimulus for hotels and restaurants in every city she visited. Beyoncé had the same impact when she opened her Renaissance tour in Stockholm in May: Swedish economists claimed her show contributed to the country’s higher-than-expected inflation that month.
There was certainly a “girls just wanna have fun” aspect to the revelry — “Barbie” was the year’s highest-grossing movie, with women around the world getting together and attending screenings dressed in the doll’s signature pink. But there…
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