Girls just want to have fun

I was at a Cyndi Lauper concert last week, finally living my dream.

Well, my 13-year-old dream, from back when her debut solo album, She’s So Unusual, came out in South Africa in 1984 and all the girls just wanted to have fun, like Cynd.

And in the spirit of the moment I dyed my hair like hers, using red crepe paper because someone told me it would wash out. It didn’t. Instead, it faded from red to pink to grey, like a tragic metaphor.

And so here we are, 41 years later, me, Cyndi and 10 000 other people in a Belfast arena. And when she takes off her vivid red wig on stage, she’s grey underneath.

It’s her farewell tour, she says, even though we never even got to say hello before, and I’m so happy.

It turns out girls – and boys – still just want to have fun, albeit now mostly seated, with specs on, and in comfy shoes.

Cyndi is 71. The capacity crowd cheers when she mentions this. “What? Are y’all cheering because I’m not dead?” she laughs.

ALSO READ: Longing for my dad’s voice

She’s great. She tells stories, one of which is young Cyndi in a record exec’s office before she was signed, and he said: “What’s this nonsense you’re wearing?”

“This,” replied Cyndi, “is what your daughters will be wearing next year.”

She was right.

She’s always been right as far as I’m concerned, from her eighties advocacy for the gay community when her friends were dying horribly of a mysterious disease, through to today, with her Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights initiative, working for female reproductive health care.

But something else she said has stayed in my head all week. She was talking about the network of women who raised her in the outer New York boroughs, women who had to fight for everything, who would turn hand-me-downs into glad rags in a heartbeat, women she wanted to emulate.

ALSO READ: Finding out what your favourite pizza topping says about you

They had dreams too, she said, and most of them never came true. And I realised, age 53, that dreams coming true is the exception, because mostly they don’t. This world is filled with people quietly nursing unlikely dreams, built on the broken dreams of the generations that went before.

It’s all the more reason to tread gently on our journey – and to have fun whenever we can.