Everyone finds Cyndi Lauper likeable, don't they? I still do, even though she seems (like most female pop singers from the 80's - don't ask me why) she's become a gay icon and seems to spend a lot of time on gay marriage advocacy.
Anyway, I was always vaguely aware that she had had a fair few troubles in her life. Her memoir, which the NYT likes, gives some idea:
Unlike recent books by Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards that have come to be regarded as models for the art of rock literature, Lauper’s memoir makes no attempt to be the least bit literary. Lauper essentially lays out the events of her life in something close to straight chronology, with digressions, in the rhetoric of lunchtime chat. Lauper grows up in a two-family house with “shingles that looked almost like the color of Good & Plenty candy.” She struggles as a young woman, so hard up at one point that she skins and cooks a squirrel for dinner. She works almost anywhere that will have her, including as a hostess for a Manhattan club catering to Japanese businessmen. She develops as a singer and songwriter, loses her voice, regains it and pampers it ever after as the precious gift that it is. She endures a vile sexual episode with her own friends and bandmates. She becomes famous, then gravely ill with endometriosis, and she proves to have a habit of saying “the wrong things to the right people” — like the time she told Steven Spielberg, in a meeting, that he wasn’t being very creative.(Actually, if she is referring to the video for that Goonies song, she was right. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to have personally directed it, and it was rather dull.)
PS: she was also charming and likeable in her one and only movie outing - the little seen "Vibes" - with (the also innately likeable) Jeff Goldblum.
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