Cyndi Lauper: Dream Girl
EVEN AMID THE EXHILARATING VISUALS OF THE IMPERIAL DRAGON, a Manhattan restaurant squirreled away in the city’s midtown music-biz district, Cyndi Lauper is a riveting presence. The decor here, definitive of a style known to devotees as Screaming Asiatic, elaborates upon vast paneled expanses of seething red-and-gold dragons, with similar mythic reptiles writhing down gilded pillars. Yet it might as well be Bauhaus the minute Lauper walks in, sporting a look that would drop drawers at a clown convention.
Tonight, she is turned out in blazing orange pants and a satin bomber jacket, under which she wears a white-beaded fringe vest pulled over an already assertive red-and-yellow shirt. Many bracelets ring her wrists, and pendulous earrings clatter about her lobes. Her eyes are shadowed with scarlet, the left lid divided by a bright gold stripe, and atop her head is a tartan cap – worn backward – from under which her hair erupts in a haystack of howling fuchsia. She pauses to survey the room, where several diners sit popeyed over their chopsticks. Not in shock, you understand, but in recognition. Acceptance. Some are even smiling. Lauper, for so long a laughingstock in both her personal and professional lives, is still not completely accustomed to such benign consideration.
“People used to throw rocks at me for my clothes,” she says in her appealing Queens-side wheeze. “Now they wanna know where I buy them, right? Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”
At the rustling of a kimono, she turns to greet a familiar waitress. Their conversation is brief but animated, and unpretentiously affectionate. Cyndi has friends everywhere. Many of them turn up in the videos with which she currently chronicles her existence. Few are of the standard glamour-puss variety, but she treasures them nonetheless.
“People are really somethin’,” she says as we search for seats. “They’re walking books, all of them. Sometimes you’ll only meet them once, but you’ll never forget them. So you try to enjoy them. That’s why, even if you’re in the ladies’ room, you should always talk to the woman next to you. Even if you’re in the stall, you can say, uh, ‘Hey! No toilet paper! I guess it’s drip-dry tonight!‘ ”
She’s still yukking as we take a table. The manager – another pal – approaches. “Life,” Cyndi says, before turning the full wattage of her winsomeness upon him, “is a great joy.”
Her happiness becomes her. Although she considers herself something of an ugly duckling, she has the radiance of true talent and, nowadays, the beauty of that talent fulfilled. Not long ago, though, Lauper’s life was nowhere near so swell. A long-struggling singer with one lone album to her credit – and that an expensive commercial flop – she had lost the band she’d dreamed of leading to pop stardom and had, in fact, been left without an official penny to her name. (In a dispute with the group’s former manager, she’d felt compelled to declare bankruptcy in a New York court) No one who’d heard her sing doubted the brilliance of her freakish, four-octave voice, and her songwriting ability was apparent even on the flop album. But less than two years ago, she was reduced to singing Little Peggy March tunes in a Japanese piano bar. She seemed a pop character without a context: a never-was, and edging toward thirty.
Then an astonishing thing happened – astonishing to everyone, that is, except Lauper and her circle of long-haul supporters. At the very nadir of her career, the dream finally came true. Her first solo album, She’s So Unusual, turned into a platinum-bound Top Ten hit And its first single, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” – which went to Number Two and spawned a rollicking video that’s made her an international celebrity – is now yielding to the bulleted follow-up “Time after Time.” Suddenly, Cyndi Lauper, with her vivid New York yawp and Vegematic clothes sense, is the queen of the nation’s TV screens: cracking up Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, trading Big Apple brays with Rodney Dangerfield at the Grammy Awards. And, of course, she’s all over MTV, the music channel, which has used her as a kind of corporate mascot.
And there lies what even some admirers already see as a problem. With her professional pinnacle as a singer finally in sight, is Cyndi Lauper now being turned into a mere cartoon, another inflatable zany for the MTV/talk-show circuit? Is the mouth overshadowing the music? Will she soon be angled off toward Broadway – or, worse yet, Hollywood? In the end, might she really prove to be nothing more than a pop-rock novelty, a passer-through? Some of this speculation has not been without a certain amount of malice, typical in the biz.
Cyndi’s heard this talk, of course. She knows who these people are. “They’ve always laughed at me,” she says, toughening reflexively. “People have always said I couldn’t sing, always tried to label me. I ain’t worried about them, because the minute I open my mouth and sing, I can blow them right offa their chairs. They can’t take your talent away from ya. I am not a Broadway singer, and I am not a movie-TV person. I ain’t into that shit. I’m no dummy. I’m not a puppet And all the people that make fun of me, or call me a cartoon….”
She pauses to pour some hot sake from a porcelain flask, dismissing the subject with a sweet scowl. “They’re talkin’ outta their ass,” she says.
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