CYNDI LAUPER: DOING THAT PRIMITIVE THING

She would have been born in the back of a New York taxi if they hadn’t crossed her mother’s legs and stuffed her back in ’til the hospital. That was 33 years ago; Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper has made a point of never being early for anything since! She’s a couple of hours late for our interview—though there are excuses; since “True Colors,” the first single from her second album of the same name, has been doing a Sir Edmund Hillary up just about every pop chart in the world they’ve kept her busy...so busy in London that I had to fly to Paris to talk to her. But there’s plenty to do to pass the time, like being searched and searched again by the guard at the Paris Intercontinental who’s convinced the tape recorder is a bomb, or musing that there can be no just God who gave those cheekbones '.to Parisians...

We meet as she’s ordering coffee and a plate of outrageous French tarts from room service. She’s child-sized and looks like a child on her best behavior, dressed in a soft, pretty mohair sweater with a tiny collar, her blonde hair unplaited and brushed into a little halo around the perfect face. She has an airbrushed quality about her like those old vaseline-lensed movie-star pictures, a fuzzy-edgeness, not only from her looks but from the way she talks, drifting from subject to mood to subject, stopping there to pose awhile, and drifting on again. One minute she’s all mystical and cosmic, the next downto-earth and practical, and just as you think you’ve pinned her down, she’s earnest. Then innocent. Then funny. Funny ho-ho as opposed to funny peculiar. Definitely—-as far as the pop world goes, and probably as far as any world goes— unusual. When most people write about her they call her “The Zany Cyndi Lauper,” “The Kooky Cyndi Lauper”— you’ve seen the stuff. America’s favorite wild-and-crazy girl in the same way Boy George was everyone’s favorite queer, where the only thing they’ve probably got in common is that they can both sing.