Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (41 page)

All of us looked like something out of central casting—including me. Up ahead and to my right was a South American soccer team.
To my right and now leaning heavily against the side of the duty-free store was a bride-to-be with her bachelorette party, and the girl had a mask on to prevent her from seeing where she was going. They wanted to get the party started, so before long they were three sheets to the wind. Then a member of the bachelorette party grabbed the mic from an airline employee and started singing. Then the soccer players joined in. Then an airplane employee said, “By the way, Cyndi Lauper is here, and I think she should sing a song.” I had sunglasses on, and I was kind of in a corner, so I thought I was being discreet.

Then everyone started getting rowdy and cheering. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll go because if I don’t, I don’t know what will happen next.” I didn’t want to be carried up by the soccer players. So I sang “True Colors” and some “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I gave my phone to one of the kids to film it, not realizing that everyone else was filming too (and that it would be on YouTube before I could blink). Then the crowd started moving in for autographs and photographs with me, which wasn’t such a safe situation. I was standing next to a woman with a baby carriage, so I said, “Whoa—get her out of here.” Then I said, “And get me out of here, too.” So they sent me down the escalator to stand and wait by the tarmac. And there I stood, waving, as everyone passed by to catch their flight—the last photo op before they left. I know my life is crazy sometimes, but that time, I really felt like I was living in a movie. You can’t make that shit up.

L
IFE CONTINUES TO
happen, with all its twists and turns. For instance, in March 2011 I was going to Japan and then Australia as part of the world tour to support the
Memphis Blues
CD. When we were flying into Japan all of a sudden we were going down and then we were going back up again. I thought, “It’s another airport adventure, like Buenos Aires.” But it wasn’t—it was actually serious. It was an earthquake. We had no place to land, so we had to land on a military base. There were some young Japanese guys with their cell phones checking on their friends. They said it hit up north, but no one said anything about a tsunami; I had no idea at the time.

Finally, we were told we had to be flown to the local Tokyo airport. By that time it was ten or eleven at night and there were people everywhere. Harried airline employees were running about trying to service them. Some were lying on the floor in what looked like disposable sleeping bags. And I thought, “Disposable sleeping bags? Only in Japan.” I watched as everyone in this crisis handled themselves gracefully. Everyone was calm and generous and behaving with dignity.

I have a long history with Japan, starting in 1984. When I went
over then, they had changed the name of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to “High School Danceteria.” Later, in 1986, I said, “Do you not want girls to understand that this song is about empowerment and entitlement?” I said to my promotion guy, Teri Tatsumi, “Do you think you’ll be changing ‘True Colors’?” and he said, “It will be ‘True Colors,’ and they will understand what it means.” He made sure of it.

Al Arashita, whose company was Kyoto, brought me over to Japan in 1986 for my “True Colors” tour and it was very successful. We did Tokyo and Osaka, which is what everyone else did. I also played the Budokan arena for three or four sold-out shows. Before I showed up, they had me sing on a TV show and they worked it out so I’d be singing live in the studio in New York to Japan. As a result of that and other promotions, tickets for Budokan sold out in a few hours. I was kind of shocked. I kept thinking, “Who do they think is playing?” Because at that point I was still counting seats. (Actually, I still worry about empty seats.)

When I sang “True Colors” in Japan at Budokan, it was a magical moment because I sang it without my band. The original plan was to sing it just with a guitar but the guitar player we had with us, Aldo, was going through a bad time. He wasn’t the secure guy I had met when he was in the studio making his own music.

So when it came time to do something sensitive and understated, I didn’t feel Aldo could play intimately with me in front of a full-to-the-brim Budokan. So Dave Wolff said to sing it alone, but I wasn’t alone, because the crowd sang it with me. And when I stopped and listened to them, I heard it in their wonderful accent, and it was the first time I had ever heard any audience, large or small, sing “True Colors” back to me.

Al opened Japan to me. After the shows, he would want to meet
us at a restaurant so he could show us all the different foods. I was the first Westerner to tour all through Japan, and I was the first woman ever to be painted and photographed with a Kabuki artist by a Kabuki artist. I was the first Westerner to be taken to the Kobe bean-throwing ceremony and honored as the “princess of good fortune.” The Japanese always took me in and always wanted to hear my music, even when my American record company thought I sucked.

In 1989, when I went over there again, another promotion guy said to me that part of why the Japanese liked me was because baby talk was very popular. I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “Cyndi, when you speak Japanese, you speak baby talk.” I had no fucking idea! I thought I knew some Japanese, because I learned it in the piano bar. Meanwhile, I sounded like an idiot. Plus my voice was higher at the time.

In 2011, when I got to our hotel in Tokyo, there were people sleeping in those sleeping bags and with blankets everywhere because the trains and buses stopped—everything stopped—so there were people in lobbies all over Tokyo. I felt so guilty about going up to my hotel room. Then I turned the TV on and that’s when I understood the magnitude of what happened—the tsunami, a whole town swept away, people screaming.

Then my manager Lisa called and said, “If you want to come home, that’s fine.” I started thinking about it and realized there were a lot of reasons why I couldn’t. The Japanese had always taken me in. How could I leave them? And we were safe.

Then I got a call from my manager saying, “Piers Morgan wants to talk to you.” I had just woken up from the bed rocking back and forth and it was so comforting, I felt like a little kid. I was like, “They got toilets that are warm, and they got beds that rock . . .” Then I opened my eyes and was like, “Wait a minute—it’s another fuckin’ earthquake!”
And Joy Behar, whom I had known through
The View,
wanted me to call in to her show. So I did, because everybody wanted to know why I was there. I said, “What do you think I’m here for?”

When those people sang “True Colors” to me it was powerful and if I left, honestly, what the hell would “True Colors” have meant? After that country had opened its heart to me? Nothing. So I’d stay to perform for eighty or ninety minutes and we’d give them a little distraction. We’d lift them up. I thought to myself that I could use whatever I have. So I used the reiki stuff that I learned, and I had come to learn that the sound of my voice, especially the midrange was very soothing. I’ve become friends with some fans, and there is one named Donny who lives in Georgia. He told me about this girl he knew who had cancer, and it was toward the end. So I called to sing to her, and her mother kept trying to say, “This is Cyndi Lauper.” Her hearing was going but I decided that right off the bat I would sing “True Colors” to her in that low midrange soft sound. And she quieted down. That’s when I realized that there was something more to my voice than just singing hit songs. So if I stayed in Japan maybe the sound of my voice would help the Japanese, like it did that girl.

So I stayed. Because I couldn’t let them down. And it wasn’t just me that stayed—so did my whole band and crew, and the whole Japanese crew, and Yuki, the guy in charge of the tour whose baby had just turned one the day the tsunami hit. I did as many shows as I could on that tour with a Japanese flugelhorn player named Toku. After a while, we were the only tour in Japan—no one was left, not Japanese, not American, not anybody. But we stayed because we wanted to give people some peace.

Then, a year later, Lisa said, “They want you back in Japan for the anniversary of the tsunami, and we can add on a lot of other dates and we can do the whole South Asian region.” But because I had been
touring for so long, my kid and my husband needed me. I needed my family, too. I realized my kid was growing up, and I was missing everything. So I said to Lisa, “I can’t go away for another couple of months—I’ll do the anniversary of three-eleven. That I have to do, no question. And then I want to come home.”

Lisa worked it out with Wowow, which is like Japan’s HBO, that if I appeared on their post-Grammys show in Los Angeles, they would sponsor a concert for me on the anniversary of the tsunami and show it for free in movie theaters in the three prefectures affected by the tsunami. Movie theaters across the rest of the country would also play it and donate their proceeds to the Red Cross. I felt honored to be asked to be a part of that, so I did whatever they wanted.

The Grammys are a big deal in Japan. They show it live in the morning, almost like a news show. So after I attended the Grammys, I went to a separate studio across from the Staples Center to give my commentary. We thought it was funny that they were set up in the penalty box of the ESPN Zone. The night of the Grammys was a little sad because Whitney Houston died. Any time a singer dies, it shakes up the singing community. We all email and text each other. But even though I was shook up that day, I still did my job. I knew if I did this, it would allow me to do something good for the Japanese people.

The day after I arrived in Japan for the anniversart of the tsunami, I got into hair and makeup at ten
A.M
. and I did TV interviews from the hotel room. I met a lot of different people, including a guy named Gutch. He gave me some sake from Fukushima and he said it was a “presento” and I said, “Let’s bust it out now and toast Fukushima.” We did his TV shoot and had some sake for his radio show. It was not like work because he was so funny. Every interview started out with a conversation about the tsunami. It was such a hard year for them.

Then everyone started talking about all that I did for the Japanese people, and I started to feel like a fraud. First, it wasn’t just me. It was all of us—the Japanese crew, too. Nobody went home. So I figured that if they’re going to make me into this hero, I should really do something good. I started to think about how I could help the kids who were in the devastated areas. I had talked to Yoko Ono before I left. She had gone up to a school in the Fukushima prefecture and hugged the kids. Nobody touches the people there because they’re afraid of radiation. So I called my husband, David, because I was really upset about this whole “making me out to be someone I’m not” thing. I’m not Lady Di. And I’m not Bono. My husband said that maybe they need someone to be that for them: “Don’t take that away just because of how you feel about it. Why don’t you go up to a school up north and bring a tree?”

Yuki, who was running my tour through Kyoto, and Nestor, who was my bodyguard, helped me make it happen. Reiko Yukawa is Yuki’s mom. She is a famous rock journalist, considered to be the rock and roll sensei of Japan. She has interviewed every rocker since Elvis and the Beatles. So she kind of walked me through it. Yuki didn’t want me to go to a radioactive area so we went to a devastated area that was on the other side of the mountains from Sendai called Ishinomaki, which translates to “Rock and Roll.” Yuki’s mom knew a fellow who was a funeral director and asked him if he might know a garden center. (I thought they must have a Home Depot, but they didn’t.)

The funeral director told Reiko that he had been doing a thousand funerals a week and he had this garden center for all the funerals he was doing. He generously donated ten cherry blossom trees. I decided to bring trees because the trees could grow with the kids and the cherry blossoms would bloom around the anniversary of the tsunami. So the kids could see some blossoms instead of devastation.

When we got there the kids were gathered in the auditorium. They were like any other grade-school kids—loud, and the boys were pushing into each other. The principal looked harried, but they were all waiting and the news crews were there too. I guess us going was big news. The media asked about the devastation and why I had come. I told them I just wanted the people to know I haven’t forgotten about them.

After we went to the school we drove through the town—or what was the town. We drove by a music store and decided to go inside and a little old man showed me where the waterline was. I wanted to buy something from him—it’s important to keep the commerce going since people aren’t buying from there. Then they took me to a school farther in. The whole hill that used to be filled with houses was completely devastated. There were no houses left. When the tsunami hit, they told me about how the kids at another school were put on the roof, but there wasn’t enough room for the parents, so they stayed on the bottom and when the water came they all were drowned.

Then we went to a temple in the middle of a graveyard. The big heavy gravestones had been tossed around like they were nothing. Inside, tables were filled with shopping bags containing human remains, unclaimed bodies. I lit incense and rang a bell three times and prayed for them. I also donated what I had in my purse. The trip really was devastating. When you see devastation like that—well, it’s devastating.

It had been snowing there and the snow had turned into rain. So it was cold and slushy. Then we took the bullet train back to Tokyo. I sang and did the show that we all prepared for on the eleventh. At the exact time the tsunami hit, all of Japan stopped for a minute to pray. Even the trains stopped. I wanted so much for my performance to be extra great, but I’m not even sure I breathed until the fourth song into
my set. I felt a little overwhelmed, like I wished I was Superwoman, but instead I was just me. In my heart I know there are no accidents. I was supposed to be there. I think Wowow was happy with the show. I hope the people of Japan were, too. The day I called my husband, David, from Japan, he said, “There’s a lot going on in the world. Sometimes the best we can do is to just be there for each other.”