Songstress Cyndi Lauper celebrated a birthday today, June 22nd; it was her 55th.  It’s possibly hard to believe that it’s been more than 25 years since Cyndi’s refreshing and unique talents were first fully appreciated by the entertainment world, after years of kicking around in small bands and developing her trademark style.  Not hard for me to believe, of course; I’m just a year younger than Ms. Lauper and was a big fan during that first phase of her still vibrant career.  As with so many exciting performers, the movies wanted a piece of her zing, her vivaciousness, that incredible appeal that pushed her to the top of the music charts.

Cyndi also had a brush with one of my other 1980′s interests, as she and her then-manager David Wolf embraced the world of pro wrestling and enhanced its ascendance into a mainstream pop culture fixture.  No one doubts that she helped move wrestling away from its image as decidedly low-brow last resort television programming to the star-making (well, at least with Duane “The Rock” Johnson) enterprise it continues as these many years later.  No one also doubts that Cyndi may have marginalized her own career a bit with her association with the glitzy but still rough-around-the-edges World Wrestling Federation.

She dabbled with the movies in 1985 when she starred in the music video for her song “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” which was written for the Richard Donner-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced fantastic kid adventure film The Goonies.  Cyndi brought along her wrestling buddies, including Captain Lou Albano, Roddy Piper, The Iron Sheik and Andre the Giant, to appear in the elaborate video.

In 1988 she got a chance to star in a movie of her own.  Fellow rocker Madonna had made one successful film three years before with the appealing Susan Seidelman-directed Desperately Seeking Susan, playing essentially herself, or her own mythic version of herself, and for Vibes the producers Ron Howard et al tried to embellish Cyndi’s already kooky image by having her play an eccentric psychic who looked and sounded exactly like…Cyndi Lauper.  Director Ken Kwapis (this was his first feature) and the rest of the cast, including the master of idiosyncratic genius-type characters Jeff Goldblum (just a couple of years after his triumph in The Fly) and the beloved and also decidedly unique audience favorite Peter Falk, were thrown into this slapstick, out-of-this-world romp with elements of Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb mixed-up with the derring-do of Indiana Jones.

Vibes was a box-office flop and the critics didn’t like it either, and Cyndi wouldn’t find true acting success until her several television guest appearances on the Paul Reiser/Helen Hunt sitcom Mad About You which eventually brought her an Emmy Award.  Cyndi’s musical career is as strong as ever, of course, and this year she’s on an around-the-world tour for her newest work.  Hollywood didn’t know quite what to do with this multi-talented woman whose theatricality was influenced by the movies — you can easily see it — but who wouldn’t achieve the kind of movie success she no doubt could have handled.  Perhaps Cyndi Lauper‘s greatest role is still to come; I’m sure that all her fans would love to see this brilliant force-of-nature get another chance on the big screen.