A generation ago pop-music sensation Cyndi Lauper, with Easter-egg hair and outfitted outrageously in thrift-shop fishnet, fringes and polka dots, snagged a 1985 Grammy Award as Best New Artist. And who could argue? Her debut album, "She's So Unusual" (1984), had become the first ever to launch five top-10 singles, including "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," "Time After Time" and "She Bop," songs which became virtual anthems for the original MTV generation.That was a long time ago. Now 54, Lauper has been married to actor David Thornton for 16 years and is the mother of a 10-year-old son, Declan. Though still girlish and hardly subdued, she has given up coloring her hair pink, blue or scrambled-egg yellow. Now the diminutive singer is, most of the time, simply a blonde - which she herself calls "boring" - and has forsaken the loud, mismatched togs of her heyday.
"I look normal so my kid won't be harassed in school, you know?" she says in her high-pitched, Betty Boop voice and thick Noo Yawk accent during a telephone interview from her Manhattan kitchen. "If I looked the same only I was older, I'd be pretty scary, wouldn't I? But I don't look like I'm going to the office!"
She may look more "normal," but between bites of a Zone diet fish dinner, warmed in her toaster-oven, Lauper - who has sold more than 25 million records - is alternately funny and profound, with salty language peppering her conversation. She's anything but boring.
"You've got to be who you are," she says. "Everybody has always wanted to change me, but who else am I going to be? Lana Turner in 'Madame X' (1966)? Joan Crawford in 'Mildred Pierce' (1945)? Oh, that scene with Veda on the staircase! Oh, my God! Come on!"
On May 31 Lauper kicked off the second year of her 25-city "True Colors" concert tour, a joint venture with the Human Rights Campaign aiming both to entertain and to raise awareness about gay rights.
Lauper's new album, "Bring Ya to the Brink," is a rhythmic dance-music collection of new songs that she co-wrote and co-produced with heavyweights of the international club scene. It sounds, well, very much like her: After hitting a career roadblock in the late 1980s, Lauper has been back in the groove for more than a decade now."I remembered my voice," she says. "I realized why I came to this forum in the first place. It was about having a richness of work and speaking your truth. Because by the time you climb your sorry (butt) to the top of the mountain, you better have something good to say, no?"
She hasn't always said it in recordings: In 2006 Lauper made her Broadway debut as Jenny in a revival of the Weill/Brecht classic "The Threepenny Opera." A 1995 Emmy winner for a recurring role on "Mad About You" (1993-1999), the singer also has appeared in the films "The Opportunists" (2000) and "Romance & Cigarettes" (2005).
The "True Colors" tour, intended to empower the gay community, was Lauper's idea. Besides herself, the rotating lineup includes Joan Armatrading, the B-52s, the Indigo Girls, Joan Jett and comedians Kate Clinton, Rosie O'Donnell and Wanda Sykes.
"I'm friend and family of the community," says Lauper, whose older sister is a lesbian. "It's very important to me. I've always been acutely aware that anyone who's different is discriminated against. The laws are really (messed) up. Who the hell died and left everyone in control of our bedrooms?"
In her youth Lauper suspected that she herself was a lesbian, as were most of her childhood friends. She tried "holding hands and kissing" with her best friend, but it didn't do anything for her.
"I was, 'It ain't for me ... but I love you,' " she recalls. "I realized I wasn't gay - and I really felt bad, because I wanted to fit in."
Lauper was "born singing," as she puts it, in Astoria, Queens, but spent her first four years in Brooklyn. Then the family - more dysfunctional than most, as she describes it - moved to Ozone Park, back in Queens.
She always wanted to become a professional singer, but everyone discouraged her from taking the risk. Instead, after dropping out of high school, Lauper, who was later diagnosed as dyslexic, worked at a variety of jobs, including horse walker at Belmont Park race track - "I'd sing George Harrison songs to the horses to calm them down" - secretary and restaurant server.
"I failed at everything," she recalls. "I was a horrible waitress. In the office I was a 'gal Friday the 13th.' I used to daydream over the files. Somebody was always screaming at me on the phone and having a heart attack. I'd say, 'Pal, take it easy!' "
It was time to try show business.
"After you fail at everything," she says, "you have nothing to lose."
Lauper and that aforementioned best friend formed a folk duo, and played their first gig for a hootenanny at Manhattan's old Gaslight Club. Next the team was hired by a cafe in Rego Park, Queens, which had no microphone.
"The guy said to me, 'Listen, girlie, we got acoustic tiles. Just aim your voice up there!' " Lauper recalls.
They were fired, she adds, when their friends in the audience heckled the comedians on the bill.
"That guy never even paid us," Lauper says. "The little rat!"
Oddly, most of the time Lauper's singing voice bears little trace of her trademark Noo Yawk squawk.
"Thank God," she exclaims. "Can you imagine? I have no idea why. When I sing, I just go into a trance."
Her husband isn't from the neighborhood, though: Not only was he born in Colorado, but also he's the son of a Harvard professor of English. He has been known to tease Lauper about her accent and her nonstandard grammar.
"Sometimes I'll say 'ain't' and 'no nevermind,' " she says. "David laughs, but he worries that Declan will."
Such linguistic lapses undoubtedly drew winces from her late father-in-law, Robert Donald Thornton, an international authority on the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
"When David and I got married," she says with a hearty chuckle, "I said, 'Dad, don't feel bad. You're not losing a son - you're gaining someone who don't talk so good!' "
It hasn't all been laughs for Lauper, though. Five years after her breakthrough, with her album sales plummeting and concert tickets not selling, she seemed to be on the verge of being washed up, a novelty act who had outlived her 15 minutes. It took a decade of hard work to rebuild her career.
"It was a difficult time for me," the singer says. "I needed to take a break. Sony (her record label then and now) wasn't the same as it used to be, and I wasn't into it. All of a sudden, it wasn't on my terms. I didn't want the hamster wheel. I saw radio change. I was trying to please everybody, and the only person I should have been pleasing was myself.
"I should have said, 'That's it!' " she says. "But I didn't know how."
Since then she has figured it out, and now has parenthood to inspire her to broaden her focus to include gay rights and other causes about which she feels strongly.
"What kind of world is my kid going to grow up in?" Lauper asks. "Still the same old (nonsense)? People have to get off their high horses and start stepping up for those who are beaten down."
"After you fail at everything," she says, "you have nothing to lose."
Lauper and that aforementioned best friend formed a folk duo, and played their first gig for a hootenanny at Manhattan's old Gaslight Club. Next the team was hired by a cafe in Rego Park, Queens, which had no microphone.
"The guy said to me, 'Listen, girlie, we got acoustic tiles. Just aim your voice up there!' " Lauper recalls.
They were fired, she adds, when their friends in the audience heckled the comedians on the bill.
"That guy never even paid us," Lauper says. "The little rat!"
Oddly, most of the time Lauper's singing voice bears little trace of her trademark Noo Yawk squawk.
"Thank God," she exclaims. "Can you imagine? I have no idea why. When I sing, I just go into a trance."
Her husband isn't from the neighborhood, though: Not only was he born in Colorado, but also he's the son of a Harvard professor of English. He has been known to tease Lauper about her accent and her nonstandard grammar.
"Sometimes I'll say 'ain't' and 'no nevermind,' " she says. "David laughs, but he worries that Declan will."
Such linguistic lapses undoubtedly drew winces from her late father-in-law, Robert Donald Thornton, an international authority on the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
"When David and I got married," she says with a hearty chuckle, "I said, 'Dad, don't feel bad. You're not losing a son - you're gaining someone who don't talk so good!' "
It hasn't all been laughs for Lauper, though. Five years after her breakthrough, with her album sales plummeting and concert tickets not selling, she seemed to be on the verge of being washed up, a novelty act who had outlived her 15 minutes. It took a decade of hard work to rebuild her career.
"It was a difficult time for me," the singer says. "I needed to take a break. Sony (her record label then and now) wasn't the same as it used to be, and I wasn't into it. All of a sudden, it wasn't on my terms. I didn't want the hamster wheel. I saw radio change. I was trying to please everybody, and the only person I should have been pleasing was myself.
"I should have said, 'That's it!' " she says. "But I didn't know how."
Since then she has figured it out, and now has parenthood to inspire her to broaden her focus to include gay rights and other causes about which she feels strongly.
"What kind of world is my kid going to grow up in?" Lauper asks. "Still the same old (nonsense)? People have to get off their high horses and start stepping up for those who are beaten down."
