TORONTO, ON – Twenty-two-year-old grown-ass woman Elizabeth Shaw is lying on the floor of her Chinatown rental, crying again.
“It’s just so sad,” she says. “How could Josh have done Olivia dirty like that? Her story is but another example of why love is dead. Love is dead and modernity killed her.”
Shaw is listening to “Driver’s License,” a sappy pop song by singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo—a seventeen-year-old Disney Channel sensation. Despite being a real adult with real-life obligations, Shaw has foregone all other activities to catch up on the “tea.”
“No, no, you don’t get it,” the very old young woman says to our newspaper. “Olivia dated this guy, Joshua Bassett, when they were starring in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, okay.”
“Josh was 18 and Olivia was 15, so they couldn’t legally date. He wrote her this song, promising that he’d wait for her and that he’d love her forever. He taught her how to drive—the implication was that once she’d gotten her license, she could drive up to his house.”
We ask Shaw when she got her driver’s license.
“About six years ago. I’ve been driving since I was 16. But that doesn’t matter! What matters is that they both live in California and need to drive through the suburbs to visit each other.”
We literally don’t care. At all.
Isn’t this woman supposed to graduate from university soon? Shouldn’t she be making post-graduation plans? Or signing up for her grad photo, at least? That’s enough for toda–
“I’m not finished. Josh’s promises are all lies, right. He starts dating this blonde girl named Sabrina Carpenter, who was on some Disney show that no one gives a shit about. Olivia is left behind, and she gets all insecure because Josh was the only person she’d ever loved and now he’s off dating some blonde girl who’s much older than her.”
“Let me sing it for you.”
No, it’s okay, we’re on a tight sched–
“AND YOU’RE PROBABLY WITH THAT BLONDE GIRL
WHO ALWAYS MADE ME DOUBT
SHE’S SO MUCH OLDER THAN ME
SHE’S EVERYTHING I’M INSECURE ABOUT
YEAH TODAY I DROVE THROUGH THE SUBURBS
‘CAUSE HOW COULD I EVER LOVE SOMEONE ELSE”
Shaw looks off into the distance. A single, escapist tear rolls down her cheek. We’re looking for ways to escape her third-floor bedroom, for which she pays monthly rent and signed a contract to lease.
She tells us that Bassett and Carpenter released their own singles in response to “Driver’s License,” but she refuses to listen to them in order to “stand in solidarity” with Rodrigo. She pledges to listen to “Olivia’s song” while she goes to her local grocery store to buy lentils, imported fine wine, and Advil for her stress-induced migraines.
At press time, Shaw announced that she had now “grown up” and was moving onto more adult music like Clairo.