Me and Cyndi go wayyy back

While other kids my age were jamming out to Weezer and R.E.M., my three-disc CD player had only one record on repeat: She’s So Unusual. 

The year was 1994.

Cyndi Lauper’s chart-topping debut album — the one with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Time After Time” and “She Bop” — was only 10 years old, but in that era long before Spotify, it was a relic, forgotten, unknown to my generation.

Half of the kids my age only listened to hip hop, the other half only listened to alternative rock, and I alone listened to ‘80s. For me, it was the music of a lost civilization, the arcadia of my youth that vanished into thin air.

Cyndi Lauper was a link to the past, one of the last survivors of that weird, wonderful world light years away from the cynicism and drudgery of the mid-1990s.

Cyndi was a harmless rebel who joyously gave no fucks.

She was a freak, but a fun freak, not the dark, sulky Smashing Pumpkins kind of freak that dominated the decade. Her look was wacky and full of color and her songs were bright and catchy, and so of course being a fanboy raised some flags.

As kids, my brother and I used to have dance parties with my mom and my stepdad where we’d each dress up and do a routine to, say,  an Ace of Base or Janet Jackson song, complete with costume. One time I wore a Converse shoe on one foot and a stiletto on the other as part of a Cyndi Lauper outfit. The color drained from my mom’s face when she saw me wearing one of her high heels, and mine went beet red with embarrassment as it hit me that I’d crossed a a line I couldn’t uncross — the rainbow line. That was the last of our family dance-offs. 

I never really liked “True Colors,” Cyndi’s not-so-subtle it’s-OK-to-be-gay anthem probably written specifically for little boys who hated P.E. as much as I did. It just wasn’t that fun. 

My Cyndi obsession continued on the DL through junior high and into high school. I checked out a Cyndi biography from the children’s section of the library and never returned it. I learned she was kind of a fuck-up early on, an art school dropout who spent much of her 20s shuffling through odd jobs and going from failure to failure. I listened to each of her albums religiously and tried to understand how she had fallen into obscurity.

For Christmas I begged my parents to buy me an off-market $120 VHS tape of the 1988 box office bomb Vibes, Cyndi Lauper’s first and last foray into Hollywood leading lady territory, where she and Jeff Goldblum play two oddball psychics searching for love, adventure and plot points from Romancing the Stone that could be reused.

When I wasn’t downloading JPGs of gay sex from the brand-new world wide web, I discovered there were other Cyndi fans out there – mostly queer middle-aged men and older divorced women.  They were passionate about the music but were otherwise very adult and boring to teenaged me, definitely not “my tribe.” I sent a cashier’s check to some guy online who sent back two cassette tapes’ worth of totally obscure Cyndi material that was literally unavailable anywhere at the time – the Goonies theme song, her demo version of Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun,” a track from her forgotten new wave band Blue Angel. The following summer, those tapes would provide a reliable mental escape from the camp for aspiring attorneys I was stuck at.  

One year later, in 1998, the world of music started to undergo an evolutionary leap forward. For the first time, music wasn’t tied to a physical object like a record or a tape or a CD — they could fit in a tiny MP3 file on your computer. Then Napster came around, and for one magical year, you could find and download basically any song ever made for free, and share your collection with the world.

By the time I saw Cyndi in concert in 2004, reliable, official lyrics to all her songs were finally available online, there were sites that sold Cyndi memorabilia and international versions of her albums, and on YouTube you could see and hear her in videos that were utterly inaccessible before: the famous music videos she made that were almost never replayed on MTV after their heydey, or her hilarious appearances on the Johnny Carson Show.

Suddenly, everyone loved the 80’s. Suddenly everyone remembered who Cyndi Lauper was.

She was finally getting the second act she deserved, and I got to see it as it was happening — in a performance at the Zona Rosa in Austin. It was part of her “At Last” tour, likely the first time since 1984 that she performed in the Lone Star State.

I was a senior at the University of Texas — my second year out of the closet. My first boyfriend had just died in a camping accident, and I didn’t know where the world was going to take me next. Then my mom made good on a 10-year-old promise to buy me a ticket if Cyndi ever had a show within driving distance. 

Live in concert, Cyndi was fabulous and funny and heartfelt, and she grabbed my hand from the stage when I reached out to her. 

She was 30 years old when she recorded “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” – by industry standards, already past her prime. She was the first female artist to have four songs from her debut album reach the Top 10 charts.

She might have had more if she had done it their way, if she had been less unusual and more compromising.

But she didn’t budge. She never let anyone tell her what she could or couldn’t sing, who she should or shouldn’t be. Bubblegum pop, new wave rock, adult contemporary, new jack swing, standards, club music, blues, rockabilly and showtunes – she has produced top caliber records in all of those genres. She has won two Grammys, an Emmy and a Tony. She did it her way, on her own terms. 

Cyndi Lauper had a lesson for the fragile, tempestuous kid I was 30 years ago: “Grow some balls.” 

Here’s what I think she’s trying to tell me today: “Don’t stop, they’re not big enough.”