Celeste Monique Lindsay, Richard Fantina’s fiancée in 1983, and I were getting very drunk at a dive on the Lower East Side when a fight broke out. Celeste watched on in mild amusement but the first was escalating so I grabbed our drinks, hopped in a bar, and it was really a good thing in the long run because we’d lost track of time and would have missed Cyndi Lauper at the Ritz. It was April 1984, and not even a year after I had interviewed Lauper, she had broken pop in a big way.
30 years later and Lauper is touring behind She’s So Unusual, the premiere pop album of the 1980s, and performing it from one end to the other. Sure, the modern day Betty Boop of pop has had many of the songs from this album a standard part of her performance: “Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun”, “Time After Time”, maybe “Money Changes Everything” –these are her standards. But however often do we get “When you Were Mine” –her Prince before Prince broke US cover, or “She Bop”, and “All Through The Night”? On the same night?
As Helen Bach noted a couple of days ago: “Its absurd that the squeaky voiced songstress with the absurd accent has been around that long.”. Absurd and exhilarating. Cyndi is playing the Beacon Theater on Wednesday, July 10th, and she is always worth watching but this is an even more exciting proposition: Cyndi will be taking me back to those long gone days. Richard and Celeste got married and divorced and Richard died in 2010. As for Celeste, I haven’t spoken to her in decades.
A must see concert, of course.
I do wonder from time to time whatever became of Celeste.