Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 14, 1993 TAG: 9306140033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANA KENNEDY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
But her voice takes care of the visual cliche.
"Jeez, how are ya?," Lauper says, leaning against the black Baby Grand piano and picking her toenail. "Can I get you some CAWFEE or something?"
Lauper has just moved into the Apthorp, a grand Upper West Side building known as the poor-man's Dakota. But if you close your eyes, you'd swear you were sitting in a two-family in Queens.
Ten years after she became famous with her first album, "She's So Unusual," and more than 20 years after leaving her unhappy home in Queens, Lauper makes no effort to hide her working-class origins.
But her distinctive accent and kooky image have all but vanished from the pop-star radar screen in recent years.
over to Lauper's apartment put it: "Oh yeah, the one with the squeaky voice. Whatever happened to her?"
Lauper hopes her comeback album, "Hat Full of Stars," will answer that question. "It was a long path to get to here," she says. "But this album is all mine. Every song is about me and what I wanted to say."
It turns out that the girl who made "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" into something approaching a national anthem found it hard to practice what she preached.
After the disappointing sales of her third album, "A Night to Remember" in 1989, and a flop film, " Vibes," with Jeff Goldblum, Lauper took a break. She came back determined "not to be anyone's puppet anymore."
"I was fighting everybody," says Lauper of her last album. "They were telling me what to do, what to wear. I was writing songs and they were handing me tapes of other people's work.
"It got to the point where I felt like saying, `How old you have to be to do your own . . . record the way you want it?' I'd started to repress myself. I need to work with kindred spirits."
Lauper co-produced "Hat Full of Stars," in stores this month, and co-wrote all the songs, most of them at her new house in Connecticut. She directed the album's first video, "Who Let in the Rain?"
She also has a new movie out with Michael J. Fox called "Life With Mikey." She even has a new husband, actor David Thornton, and calls herself a "newlywed."
"It's a full circle to me," says Lauper, settling down cross-legged in a hassock. "I've come home to myself."
Lauper says that her early eccentric image - multicolored hair, Minnie Mouse voice and ditzy clothes - were interpreted as a gimmick. When the gimmick lost its novelty, so did she.
"But it wasn't a marketing concept; that's who I really was," she says. "The record company people just didn't get me. They didn't understand who I was."
Lauper explains how her new album tells the story of her life.
The title track, "Hat Full of Stars," stems from a time in her life when she was "very lonely and sad and poor and cold."
It was before she returned to New York to make it as a singer-songwriter and before she thought she ever had a chance at success.
Lauper, then about 19, had landed on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont with her dog, Sparkle. Two years earlier, she had fled her childhood home because of an abusive stepfather.
She moved in with her sister on Long Island, took care of horses at a racetrack and subsisted on food stamps.
She eventually wound up camping out at a state park for a few months, Lauper decided to move to Vermont.
Though the winter was freezing and her welfare check wasn't even enough for a winter coat, she did have a special hat.
"I had a hat I always wore," she says. "At night I'd look up at this wonderful sky full of stars. The only sad part was I didn't have anyone to share it with. I thought that if I held up the hat I could fill it up with stars and carry it with me."
by CNB