At 70, Cyndi Lauper Has Nothing Left to Prove

She’s plotting a farewell tour. She’s starring in a documentary about her life. And she could only ever be herself.

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One Friday afternoon in May, Cyndi Lauper stepped out of her Upper West Side apartment building and into the streets of New York City. She wore glitter-encrusted glasses, sneakers with rainbow soles and a stack of beaded bracelets on each arm. A rice-paper parasol swung in her hand. As she walked, she examined the crowds and remarked when glints of interest caught her eye.

“Of course, up here it’s fashion hell,” she allowed of her tony neighborhood. And yet, every few blocks she rubbernecked at another woman’s look, her famous New Yawk accent lifting and tumbling in pleasure at what she saw:

“Look at these dames, how cute are they?”

“Did you love those pants? I kind of loved those pants.”

“Look at this lady,” she said, stepping off the curb and clocking a passerby. The woman moved nimbly, tomato-red streak in her silver hair, body draped in shades of fuchsia and cherry as she pushed the gleaming metal frame of a walker. “Fabulous,” Lauper exclaimed. “Come on!”

At 70, the pop icon and social justice activist isn’t just charging back into the streets. On Monday, Lauper announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary about her life and career that premiered at the Tribeca Festival last year, is streaming on Paramount+.

Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”

And until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for the director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across the city in the 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.

“Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video,” she said of her fans. She has a lot of people who get her: The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than one billion times. Forty years later, she holds it up as a thesis, the key to decoding her artistic perspective and understanding everything that followed. After all, “You never have to wonder where a New Yorker stands,” she said. “They’ll tell you, straight up.”

CYNDI LAUPER, BORN in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, bopped around the house to the Beatles’ songs, her older sister, Elen, singing McCartney’s parts and Lauper taking Lennon’s. It was her earliest lesson in harmony and song structure. But when she left home at 17, it was with a copy of Yoko Ono’s feminist conceptual art book “Grapefruit” in her hands.

Ono taught her that “you can create art in your head, and then you can view things differently,” Lauper told me. This attitude served her well as she tried (and often failed) to work as a painter, a shoe saleswoman, a racetrack hot walker, an IHOP waitress, a gal Friday at Simon & Schuster and the singer in a cover band.

Singing other people’s music in Long Island clubs and dive bars, Lauper struggled to find her place. She tried to channel Janis Joplin, but “I was stuck inside her body, and she didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it,” she said. She tried to sound like Gene Pitney, and “it came out sounding like Ethel Merman.” After a while, “You start to feel that you’re just not good enough.”