Taylor Swift: The girl-next-door superstar

Count yourself lucky, parents who brought your screaming, deliriously happy daughters to see local-girl-made-good Taylor Swift's Speak Now tour at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday night in South Philadelphia.

Swift, who reminded the crowd of 51,000 early on that "I actually grew up right down the road in Reading, Pa." - though, actually, it was in nearby Wyomissing, in Berks County - is only playing six outdoor football stadium shows on the North American tour named after her 3.5 million copy selling 2010 album.

So if you thought all that ecstatic shrieking was loud when the pop singer-songwriter took to the stage to a recording of Tom Petty's "American Girl" at the start of the 2 hour, 8 outfit production, or when fireworks shot off behind her during the opening "Sparks Fly," or when she floated above the crowd on a suspended-by-wires faux balcony on the fairy tale closer "Love Story" - well, just imagine how loud it would have been if there were a roof on the building.

At 21, the always precocious Swift is already a practiced show woman. And she comes by her enormous appeal to young girls naturally.

On the one hand, she's the glamorous, nearly 6-foot tall porcelain-skinned country-pop princess. On the other, she's a gangly, barely out of her teens, semi-awkward girl next door, who made no vocal flubs on Saturday, but is by no means a flawless powerhouse vocalist. Her strength, instead, is bonding with her audience by turning heart-on-sleeve diary entries into super-catchy pop songs that display a schooled-by-country sense of craftsmanship but never feel like they come off the assembly line.

At the Linc, Swift put on a show that was padded with too many watch-the-dancers-while-I-put-on-another-dress interludes. And it started to drag during the pre-encore stretch, with the rather lumbering "Haunted," and a "Dear John" (that's the expert John Mayer take-down) that was marred by inappropriate fireworks explosion that spoiled the intimacy of the moment.

But otherwise, it was pretty much an "Enchanted" evening (to borrow a Speak Now song title). Swift seemed genuinely moved and showed skill at milking the affections of the crowd in "the place I'm from," where she remembered playing "festivals and fairs, coffeehouses and karaoke contests."

Every night on the Speak Now tour, Swift scrawls a song lyric down the length of her left arm. On this night it came from Elton John: "'Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia Freedom."

At the start, she recalled her father watching Eagles games on TV when she was growing up. For the first encore,"Fifteen," she and her entire band - whom she praised lavishly but never introduced by name - donned team jerseys.

Midset, she walked through the crowd to the back of the floor, where she played ukulele in a purple dress while sitting under a silver fairy tree that spun like a wind-up music box.

There she did "Fearless," with a bit of Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" thrown in, and her own "Last Kiss." And she also cannily added a couple of Philadelphia connected tunes to the program, in Pink's "Who Knew," and "Unpretty," by TLC, the 1990's R & B hitmakers that featured the late Philadelphia rapper Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes.

There was one country-flavored segment, during which Swift, who also played guitar and piano, wore pigtails and flecked a banjo. That was when she did "Mean," the anti-bullying anthem from Speak Now. It's not one of her best songs, but reinforces the idea that Swift is the nicest of nice girls in an often profane and nasty over-sexualized pop landscape.

That may well be true, but the compelling thing about "Mean," and much of Speak Now, is that it's not as nicey nice as you might think. When she decides to hit back, like when, at the Linc, she called the "Mean" bully "a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life" or when she shook her stuff in a red mini-dress in "Better Than Revenge" and targeted a boyfriend-stealing actress "better known for the things she does on a mattress," she can be quite nasty. And that bodes well for her as well as her screaming school girl fans as they mature together in a mean, grown up world.