Cyndi Lauper and her Generous Gift of Humanity
What the patron saint of weirdos teaches us about re-humaning
You know how there are moments in time when your life changes a little but still significantly? You’re just a little different from that point on? I think one of those moments for me was when Cyndi Lauper’s first album, She’s So Unusual, was released and the singles began playing on MTV. Specifically in 1983, it was her first hit, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The video seemed to play every hour and that was more than okay with me. I watched every time. After an abrupt slide across the keyboard like a record scratch to break from whatever was happening prior to that moment, we see Cyndi sashaying joyfully down the street of her borough, returning to the working class childhood home she still resided in — complete with irate, exasperated parents — coming home in the “morning light” after a long night of revelry and still buzzing from the experience. I was captivated from the jump.
What she was singing about what not superficiality or lack of responsibility (“When the workin’ day is done, oh, girls just wanna have fun…”), she was singing about freedom, about autonomy, about making your own decisions, about allowing oneself to be silly and play even as an adult. This may not sound like much today, but for me at 16, it was revelatory. In an era of self-identified boy toys* and women being pushed into the margins or used as little more than eye candy by the music industry, I was finally looking at someone seemingly who had no fear of being seen and would not subdue that remarkably agile voice of hers and lively spirit for anyone, not audiences or record executives. She gambled that there would be some of us who loved what she was presenting and she made a good bet. In that song, Cyndi also showed us an alternative to growing up and becoming boring and joyless: You have to pay your bills, yes, but you can and should still have fun with your friends. You get to decide. (I especially loved learning today that the song that made her famous, “Girls…” is both a cover and a clever clap-back in one fell swoop.)
As I watched Cyndi Lauper singing on Tuesday when she came to my town on tour, I had no doubt that the teenager from 1983 within me who was once starving for the voice of a woman with autonomy and confidence was still kicking inside me. This is a woman standing in and luxuriating in her power, I thought as I watched Cyndi. This is what it looks like. Not the power to inflict harm upon others. Not the power to make those around you feel intimidated and insignificant. It’s the power of fully knowing you deserve to be seen, heard and considered, of inhabiting the world fully. Her voice, an improbable giant somehow stuffed into a body as petite as hers, filled the night sky with warmth and comfort. I was wearing my Girls Just Want To Have Fundamental Rights shirt, and I didn’t know whether to cry or dance as she belted her big heart out, so I did both. Why choose? Both felt right.
The bittersweetness of living in an era when reproductive self-determination and HIV prevention are taking massive hits by this administration all those years after Cyndi became famous was a gut-punch of its own.
As a weird, sensitive kid who grew up into a weird, sensitive teen and, big surprise, weird, sensitive adult, I haven’t ever needed permission to be my weird, sensitive self because it was never a real option to suppress, but finding a role model who embraced her full, quirky humanity out loud at an impressionable age was certainly an assist. I would have been myself either way, but Cyndi, through her unapologetic example of self-love and self-determination, made it easier.
There is a lot to say about what I have admired about Cyndi Lauper over the years, so much that it’s hard to narrow it down, but I will say it includes her tenderness and activism**, her decades-long, genuine allyship towards the LGBTQ community to that singular instrument of hers, her promotion of multiculturalism in her videos during a time when things were quite segregated and emphasis on female musicians on her recent tour, or, if you just want to be superficial, just her banging personal style.
I went to the show by myself, intending to sit with friends there, but we were thwarted from sitting together through no one’s fault. (Well, maybe the venue’s fault but such is life.) I am not usually one for starting conversations as I am on the introverted side, but I had so many lively conversations with people, from the woman I stood in line with (hi, Jennifer, you’re awesome!) to the friendly women seated next to me. I’d brought an extra Girls Just Want To Have Fundamental Rights shirt I’d found thrifting in case someone from my friend group wanted it but it wasn’t a size anyone wore. (My friends and I met up but couldn’t sit together.) I gave my extra shirt to one of the women sitting next to me. Beyond the animated conversations were just so many warm smiles between all the people before the show in their bracelets, clashing patterns, fist-fulls of necklaces, neon hair and makeup. Maybe Cyndi attracts good people?
It’s interesting because I am the much more emotional person between my husband and myself, but he’s the one who gets choked up during music, not usually me. That was not the case at the show. Cyndi Lauper was and is a precious reminder of what we are capable of in our full, messy humanity. How can that not make you clutch your heart in gratitude and cry at taking in that audacious beauty?
Time after time. Time after time. Time after time. Thank you, Cyndi.
* Nothing against Madonna or her fans, she’s just not for me.
** Please read the lyrics