Cyndi Lauper went to college in Johnson. Saturday, she gave the commencement address
JOHNSON – Cyndi Lauper attended what was then called Johnson State College in the early 1970s. She failed to earn a degree in her time there in 1973 and 1974.
The Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award-winning musician jumped ahead a few degrees Saturday. Billed in the commencement program as Cynthia Ann Lauper, she received an honorary doctorate just before delivering the commencement address at what’s now Northern Vermont University – Johnson.
Lauper hit it big with songs such as “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Time After Time” and “She Bop” from her debut 1983 album, “She’s So Unusual.” Saturday’s ceremony gave her the chance to reflect on her time in Vermont that shaped her in unexpected ways.
“The thing is, in my short stay here I didn’t even realize how much I learned,” Lauper told graduates. “I was so afraid of failing, because I was failing.”
Lake Champlain and the leaves of Vermont
Lauper, a New York City native, told students how she wound up in Vermont.
“It was 1971, I was on welfare in Burlington and I had been traveling around that fall, you know, bumming around with my friends and my dog, Sparkle. Yeah, she came here, too,” Lauper said to laughter. “When I saw Lake Champlain and the leaves turning so many bright colors I had to stay.”
She went to a youth hostel/home for runaways in Burlington, where employees helped her find work as a mother’s helper. “It turned out I wasn’t a lot of help,” she said. “So that didn’t work out for me.”
Jobless and on welfare, Lauper wanted a job rather than public assistance. At the welfare office, the 19-year-old Lauper met an employee with a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “At the time I thought he looked like he was ready to delve into problem-solving,” she said. “And at that first meeting he laid out a plan that not just got me a job, but a future.”
Johnson influenced ‘She’s So Unusual,’ ‘Hat Full of Stars’
The man at the welfare office found a job for Lauper at a kennel after she told him she liked working with animals. He figured out a way for Lauper, a high-school dropout, to get her general-equivalency diploma, and set her on a course to go to college and study art.
“They (the students) were just in the classroom painting what was outside the window and I figured, 'OK, I could come here,’” Lauper said, recalling her first visit to Johnson State. “I was hoping that when I came here I really felt I could learn how I could become an artist, a great one, because of the beauty and because of the freedom, and it was a relaxed thing here.”
A couple of Vermont moments would appear in Lauper’s musical career, including one involving a hat. “With this hat on one night, with one of those great nights where the stars are totally incredible, I never wanted to forget it,” Lauper said, clutching the same floppy brown hat she wore then. “So I held the hat up and I closed my eyes, and in my mind’s eye I filled it with the sky, with the stars.” That shaped the theme and artwork for her 1993 album “Hat Full of Stars.”
While at Johnson, Lauper painted art on the soles of shoes, which came into play on another album.
“It was the precursor to the shoe piece I made on the back of the ‘She’s So Unusual’ album cover,” she said of the Van Gogh-inspired artwork. “The study of the great Impressionist painters and the compositions that they did, that helped me to turn those compositions and what I had in my head into the album covers that I made. I art-directed quite a few of them, like most of them. And that was from the foundation of what I learned here.”
Tip of the hat to ‘Kinky Boots’
Lauper joined campus radio station WJSC. (“Can you imagine, with this accent I had a show?” she said with her New York intonation that turns “asked” into “axed.”) That’s where the musician-to-be had her first real exposure to using audio equipment and making setlists for a radio show.
“I learned without even realizing that that was what I was going to learn,” Lauper said. “Learning how to make a setlist – who knew? I didn’t think I was going to be a singer, but here I am.”
Saturday’s commencement was the 152nd at the Johnson campus but the first for Northern Vermont University, which last year combined Johnson and Lyndon state colleges under its umbrella. NVU President Elaine C. Collins presaged Lauper’s address by noting that some students already have jobs or graduate school lined up while others are unsure of the next step.
“Much about your lives will continue to unfold in glorious uncertainty,” Collins said, adding that the education the students received in Johnson will lead them to success.
Students who spoke offered their own advice. Cherise Boutin of Hyde Park, a graduate student in counseling, urged students to continue sharing their gifts with the world. Patrick Clow, a distance-learning student who earned his bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from his home in Williston, concluded his remarks by reminding graduates to answer the door while wearing pants.
The most-poignant remarks, though, came from Lauper, who quoted the song “Take What You Got” from her Tony-winning musical “Kinky Boots”: “You gotta take what you got/Even when your life is in knots/You take aim, take your shot/Sometimes you gotta rewrite the plot/You gotta take what you got.”
“Today,” she said in concluding her address, “before you toss your cap in the air, make it your own hat full of stars, so one day you can remember the beauty and promise that you feel today.”
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.