Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (35 page)

Rosie O’Donnell got on board with it too, because it just so happened that she had a falling-out with
The View
and she had some time. I first met her in 2002 at a Cher show and she was in the audience taking pictures. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, she’s under my chin, I hope those pictures are okay.” Because sometimes you’re bent over yelling, pouring your guts out, and that’s just not a pretty picture. And I think after that I went to her house for something, around 2004 or so, and I remember being nervous.

But I felt a real connection with her. Because she’s a bit of a misfit, like me. There is a sadness in her heart, as funny as she is. And also, even though she grew up on Long Island, we have similar accents. We speak in the same vernacular. We aren’t from fancy neighborhoods, we are from the lower middle class, and I understand and relate to her based on that. I can’t relate to her about losing your mom, but my sadness comes from feeling so alienated as a kid that I didn’t even know why I was fuckin’ alive. I used to think, “Why did God make me so weird, so in another world all the time?”

I find it really extraordinary that I feel so close to Ro, yet there are a lot of things I wouldn’t share with her. I’m afraid to, because deep down inside I think people who are very successful think that other
people just want to leech off of them, and I don’t want to ever freakin’ be a part of that. I want to have relationships based on equal ground, so wherever I’m not equal, I kind of hold back a little bit—especially with famous people, because you don’t know what’s in their heads. Although Ro is the most down-to-earth famous person I’ve ever met. I thought Ellen DeGeneres was like that, too—very funny, but very down-to-earth. But I never struck up a really deep friendship with her like I did with Ro. There was just something about Ro, and she loved my music—like when I’m writing stuff, I send it to her before I put it out, because she asked me to.

So she went on my tour, and I did some performances on her cruise for gay families. This is how much I care about Ro, because I can’t swim that good. And I don’t like to get my face wet and God knows I don’t want my hair wet—I don’t want it changing to a color I don’t put in there myself. The cruise went to Nova Scotia, and I froze, of course. At one point, we got off the boat to go on another boat to go look at whales. There were no whales though, and the water was rough, and I thought, “Why am I on a boat, when I just got off a boat?”

The second time I did it, we went to Alaska, and Lisa thought we should bring our families with us to show them that there are all different kinds of families. So I brought my kid. We got to Seattle and it was all going good. My son met the captain and he was being the cutest, funniest kid. Then he had to walk across the gangplank, and the ship was like a tall building and he has a fear of heights, so he said he wouldn’t do it. Well, Rosie happened to be on the other side so she called, “Declyn, how you doing?” to distract him and got him across. Anyway, my kid’s a hockey player and a lot of kids on the teams are homophobic—adolescents and preadolescents like to quote from
South Park
and say, “Oh, that’s so gay.”

Here’s another thing Ro did. The first night there was a party on the boat and there was liquor around. So Dec looked at me laughing and picked up a closed bottle of alcohol to make believe he was drinking it. I said, “Dec, that’s not funny, put that down.” And Ro walked up behind him and said, “Actually, Dec, that is kind of funny, but I could see how your mother would be very upset by that.” She has such a way with children. They love her. Another great thing about Rosie is that she initiated having my sister, Elen, come onstage and play guitar with me on that trip and a few times on the “True Colors” tour. It was awesome, because it was like when we used to play together when I was eleven. Rosie was very open to my sister, very nice to her, even though she wasn’t famous—some people who are famous are only nice to famous people.

The “True Colors” tour was timely because at that time, you gotta understand, things were really tough with George W. Bush. He and his administration were saying hateful things, to the point where my gay friends were talking about leaving the country and I was like, “Wait a minute—this is our country, what are you talking about?” The first time the issue of gay marriage came up, the Republicans shot that down right quick and I thought, “Gay men do all those batty old Republican ladies’ hairdos and dress those women up, but when it comes time to give a little support, those women don’t open their mouths.” The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed the House and the Senate, but Bush wouldn’t sign it. In his mind, God didn’t create the gays. But that doesn’t change the fact that hate crimes go on every day. The guy who did my makeup and hair on
The Celebrity Apprentice
once took a train from the set to his home in Spanish Harlem, and he was surrounded by guys yelling at him not to look at them. All the other riders just turned their heads and did not say a word.

I felt it was important for parents of gay kids who just couldn’t handle or understand it to talk to other parents of gay children. Because who were they going to talk to? They couldn’t go to the church because they’d just tell you you’re going to hell and your kid’s going to hell, or they’d try to “cure” you. You’re either born gay or you’re not. It’s not something that you decide to be. If you could decide, why would you want to be something that makes people act so horrible to you? Hatred comes from ignorance and fear, and the gays became scapegoats for the Bush administration, which diverted people’s attention from what was really going on, like the war in Iraq.

So I was so happy when Ro got on board the “True Colors” tour, and then other artists started jumping on board, too. The British group Erasure was right there ready to go with us, and I thought that was just amazing. On the 2007 tour we also had Deborah Harry, Boston’s the Dresden Dolls, and the Canadian band the Cliks, who were awesome. There was a lot of speculation about why straight people were putting on a tour for the gay community, but I wanted it to be inclusive, like I said.

Margaret Cho was the MC, and Judy Shepard and a lot of other people had a problem with her show. Mothers would leave during her set and say, “Cyn, I think the subject matter is just not right for my kids.” Margaret’s material is about fucking and sucking and blow jobs. It’s funny, but it’s mature content, and the problem is that my music is cross-generational. So they brought their kids because of me. But I wasn’t going to censor her because that wouldn’t be right—that’s her act. She did a great job transitioning from one musical act to the other. She moved that show forward.

What I wanted to do was to make it a festival, a one-day destination where we could all have fun together, where we could have a tea party and dance with DJs. And just be able to feel that we’re all family and then have a concert at night.

It was so much fun for me because I could pick all the cool artists that I liked, and all night long I was able to listen to their wonderful music. When you have your own tour you can set the tone, and I wanted to make everyone comfortable. I sat in the cafeteria with the performers. If they needed hairspray, I had it. The door was always open, you know what I mean? And then at the end of the night I would sit with the Cliks or the Dresdens and we’d all hang out and have a beer or whatever, and talk about music, about art. It was the kind of thing I always wished I could do. I loved the camaraderie.

The Gossip performed at some shows, too, and they were so great. Before lead singer Beth Ditto went onstage, I’d run around to help her, saying, “Okay, what do you need? Come to my room, I got this, I got that.” One time I told her, “Look, you get out there and you take no prisoners.” That night she pulled her dress off and sang in her underwear. I was like, “Okay, she threw off her dress like I throw off my shoes. How awesome is she?”

Sometimes younger artists like when you give them advice, and sometimes they don’t. When Lady Gaga and I did MAC’s Viva Glam campaign together for MAC’s AIDS fund, I tried to help her out. If I saw her leaning on her thigh, which would make your thigh look bigger, I would tell her to come up and lean on me. We spent one whole day together working our asses off getting our photos taken, and she helped me too.

I saw a little of myself in her. I said, “Wow, I even dance like you,” and she looked at me and said, “Cyn, I used to study you.” A lot of people say that older artists inspire the young, and I thought especially after working with her on the campaign that it goes the other way too. Gaga woke me up to the fact that I was making myself plainer and plainer and plainer because everyone was telling me, “You can’t do this, your clothes are weird,” and to this day I still get grief about
what I wear. So now I just wear black. And when I worked with Gaga, I was able to relax and have fun. I could be myself without feeling like a freakazoid, because in a lot of ways we were cut from the same feathered, hot-glue-gunned cloth. We could just be the way we were, because we’re artists and that’s just the way it is.

When she said she studied me, I imagined this crazy image of her when she was a baby, standing in front of the TV set, putting on and pulling off her sunglasses to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I see Gaga is very good at taking inspiration from outside influences and reinventing them in herself. Madonna does the same thing. Hell, we all do that. Maybe my inspirations are from old movies sometimes, but that’s what I loved about Gaga the first time I saw her. She looked like
La Dolce Vita
!

So back to the “True Colors” tour. Touring was a lot of work, but we had an awesome time, especially on the West Coast. I never shook so many hands in my life. I felt like I was running for mayor. But I knew I was doing something good. I used to go backstage and do more meet-and-greets because I sold the pictures for charity.

On the San Diego stop, I remember trying out a song of Erasure’s called “Blue Savannah.” I asked my guitar player at the time, Knox Chandler (a great innovative rock guitarist), if he would play a kind of twisted low-string Duane Eddy part to it. I sang over it and felt like I was in my own black-and-white movie; I was Roy Orbison and Edith Piaf all at once. It was live and then it was gone, but I lived in that moment, for however long it was. Then back to more pictures and handshakes.

And when there were mishaps onstage, I’d weigh the situation quickly and then act. There was an awkward moment once with Knox during “Money Changes Everything.” I almost knocked him over, guitar and all. I had tried to crawl between his legs at the end of his solo, but his legs weren’t really wide enough apart to crawl
through. I guess I was in my own Rolling Stones movie (did Mick ever do that?). Anyway, the poor bastard almost went down, and being under his legs at the time, I pushed his butt up with my head, kind of like a soccer ball. That’s a little behind-the-scenes story from the show—really the “behind scenes,” if you know what I mean. I kill myself sometimes!

And San Francisco is such a magical city, so I loved when the tour stopped there. And let’s face it, there’s so much history there: the hippie movement, City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the movie
Vertigo
was shot there, Tony Bennett’s song about “that city by the bay”. . . . How can I not love it there?

So when Lisa, my manager, suggested we walk down to the water, I said, “Of course.” So off we went. At first, it was very invigorating. Then we found a place called the Blue Mermaid Chowder House & Bar, and I thought maybe it was the same one that Joni Mitchell talked about in “Carey” (the song, not the movie
Carrie
). Eh, probably not.

Anyway, Lisa and I had all kinds of seafood chowder there for lunch, which of course threw my whole diet to hell. The two of us love to eat. At first we were going to take the trolley up the hill after our meal. But then we had a chowder sampler, followed by more chowder, followed by a salad (which made us feel as though we were actually following some sort of diet). And of course we ordered white wine instead of red, thinking it was lighter.

Well, after dinner, we decided to walk back. And the thing about walking is that you get to discover new things and places you wouldn’t have noticed in a cab or car. So in the same way one might digress in a conversation, one might digress in a walk. And then we just kept walking and said things to each other like, “Can you feel it in your legs and butt yet?” But after about an hour or more of this, we were definitely lost.

After a while I felt like we were in an
Ab Fab
episode. After listening to everyone’s directions, we went up and down the hills several times. I felt like crawling but couldn’t show Lisa the wimp I really was. So I made jokes and said I didn’t mind a long walk—just the heatstroke. I kept calling information to call the Fairmont Hotel to come pick us up and the hotel would go, “Which Fairmont did you want?” They said there were two. I didn’t know which one. When we finally made it back, of course it was happy hour at the bar in the hotel. We felt we should treat ourselves to a Bellini. It’s Friday, we told each other—what the heck. Oh. Wait. No, it wasn’t. Well, it was
our
Friday. Anyway, after a while, we decided to finally get some sleep after the long bus ride we had the night before. But I couldn’t sleep, which led me to go online. Which led me to look at an article written about Britney Spears and me and the “True Colors” tour in the “Page Six” column of the
New York Post.
It said that her choreographer told
People
magazine that Britney was going to come onstage with us at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and that she decided not to.

So the real story was this: Britney was invited to perform in Las Vegas with us. But no one representing Britney ever responded. So I wrote a blog post that said,

Here’s the deal, Brit: If ya hear this, you are welcome to come to the Greek Theatre. This is a good cause, and I am grateful that the spirit moved ya, doll. And if you are coming, can you contact us? Though I don’t know you, you seem like a good kid. You are welcome.