Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read Online Free

together a dress for school and then ran up the six blocks to Liberty Avenue, like I always did, in chunky high shoes, carrying my portfolio in my hand and my books under my arm and a handbag over my shoulder. The dress had the seams sewn on the outside, which I thought looked good—it was just that the idea of deconstruction hadn’t really come into its own yet. I must have been a sight.
    As a freshman at Fashion Industries you took different kinds of sewing classes, like the power-sewing machine class or the fine-material machine class. I got a little depressed in the shoe-making class because all we sewed was a calfskin knife case. I also imagined that the class led to a job at a shoemaker under a pile of broken shoes that needed to be mended. My fine-material machine sewing class teacher dressed in a very old-fashioned way, with a knee-length straight skirt and a short-sleeve shirt with cuffs, and she’d always stuff a pressed handkerchief up the left sleeve. She gave me a seventy and told me the knots on the end of my needle and thread for hand stitching were like torpedoes.
    The art class was the kicker. I actually loved it but got on the far wrong side of the teacher. She wanted me to move my seat and I didn’t understand why, so I said I wouldn’t. Then she said the only way I’d pass was if I brought in twelve paintings by the end of the term. So I painted and painted. And I loved it. I would stay up all night in my room with poor ol’ Elen in the other twin bed next to mine, with her head under her pillow while I painted. Looking back, I see that I was very selfish for having the light on. But my big sister was a good sport. I used watercolors and poster paint, which was very easy to maneuverwithout an easel. I just painted on the floor. I created pictures of the woods at night or my grandmother’s garden, which was moonlit right outside my bedroom window.
    Then the day came when I proudly handed them in to my teacher. But she was being threatened by one of the bigger girls in the class, who told her that she better not fail her. The school wasn’t exactly in the best neighborhood and there was always some rough trade to maneuver around. Since she was busy, I said, “Here are the paintings,” and put them down in front of her and left.
    When I got my report card, I received a zero in art. The teacher said she never got any paintings from me. I should have remembered one of those Aesop’s fables—the one with the moral that goes something like “Always get a receipt.” I was crushed about losing all that work. There were other failures, too, like my English and math classes. I had mostly spent my time painting and I never got much else done.
    Everybody told me to study hard, but nobody ever taught me how to study. I was just told that I’d better learn or I’d wind up like everyone else around me, which was very upsetting. But I just never knew where to start, and it was always a daunting task that I would put off, until I just fell asleep. There were times when I would open up a book and leave it open next to me, completely terrified. I was too anxious to study and felt doomed to fail. So I failed. I figured if I was going to fall, I might as well hit the bottom and get the worst of it over with. I remember bringing home a report card with every grade a failing one, and the zero in art. I guess there was a moral I should have learned from that experience, too, but it was too crushing to think about. I remember my stepfather looking at my report card and saying, “You failed gym? Isn’t that like failing lunch?”
    But before I flunked out, I was put in something called a nonachieving-genius class. There was this English teacher in there whoactually was very inspiring. She brought in a Janis Ian song and laid it out like a poem instead of lyrics. Song lyrics at their best are poems, and that part interested me. What inspired my English teacher to think I was worth helping was my understanding of the