Celebrity hype around a T-shirt is good news for otters, and a fun story to tell.

Do you have a favorite Taylor Swift song? Maybe I should just come clean right now and admit that I don’t—I’m not a Swift fan although I have tried to give her a shot, but none of her albums have spoken to me since 1989.

Sara Rubin here, and if you’re still reading despite my Taylor Swift confession, maybe there’s a redemption arc. As my colleague Pam Marino was working on a story about a T-shirt that Swift wore and turned into something big, I decided to join in on the hype and I got myself a shirt. 

OK, maybe I’m overselling my redemption narrative. I got the shirt because I think it’s a great shirt, and because it was a donation to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, not because I’m a Swiftie. (Marino’s granddaughters are, so she donated and got shirts for them.) 

But you don’t need to get the hype to appreciate Marino’s great storytelling in a feature in this week’s edition of the Weekly. She reports on how Swift wearing the vintage 1993 Monterey Bay Aquarium T-shirt in the film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl immediately resonated with local Swifties—Monterey County Supervisor Wendy Root Askew among them—and it registered immediately at the Aquarium.

You can read in more detail in Marino’s story about how the Aquarium team located the original artwork and decided to produce more, making them available in exchange for a donation of $65.13 (the number is a Swiftie thing). Then $2.3 million and 35,000 shirts later, they paused the fundraiser. 

Marino tried to figure out where Swift (or her celebrity fiance, Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce) found the shirt. She called around to a few local thrift shops; it seemed probable that a 1993 Aquarium T had cycled into a local secondhand collection and maybe Swift or Kelce found it here. 

While Marino was not able to get an answer to that part of the origin story, her telling of what we do know is still a great read. 

It’s too late to get a shirt, but you can donate to the Sea Otter Program any time—and I encourage you to read Marino’s story to learn more about how it all happened.