REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:Girls, reporter have fun at Lauper concert

If you attend one of this summer’s concerts at the Orange County Fair, you’ll likely enjoy some predictable sights and sounds.

You’ll see fans with their teenage children beside them, swaying to the hits of a generation or two ago. You’ll hear the crowd break into appreciative applause during the opening bars of a classic ? especially if, in some cases, it’s the performer’s only one.

What you will probably not see is an artist bounding across the stage for two hours, pushing the band through one high-octane performance after another, rocking mercilessly as if success ? and supper ? were just one break away. At an event like the fair, where most of the headlining acts are beloved veterans, complacency tends to edge out nerve.

Until Tuesday night, that is, when Cyndi Lauper shook the Pacific Amphitheatre with one of the most exhilarating shows of this or any other year.

Before I proceed to talk about her, let me say that I have attended concerts on both ends of the pop spectrum. I’ve seen Bob Dylan, fresh off of a Grammy sweep, filling his set with new material and enunciating lyrics for the first time in years. I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, their latest album atop the charts, pounding through an epic three-hour set and still getting called back for encores.

I also frequent clubs and coffeehouses around Orange County, where I’ve watched performers desperate for someone ? anyone ? to buy their latest homemade disc. Artists like these don’t take their fans for granted. At one show I attended, the singer-songwriter who headed the bill stood by a table in back afterward, promising a hug to any patron who went home with her record.

It’s a long road from that coffeehouse to the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. By the time a performer reaches a venue like the Orange County Fair, however, he or she has come to a middle ground: loved by many, but no longer expected to grace the cover of Newsweek.

Cyndi Lauper is that kind of artist. Her debut album, 1983’s “She’s So Unusual,” became one of the top sellers of its time, spawning five hit singles and getting Lauper named “Woman of the Year” by Ms. Magazine. For a few years in the mid-1980s, she was everywhere ? on MTV, playing a character with the World Wrestling Federation, even singing the theme song for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

Then, like so many performers who strike gold overnight, her career went into decline. Within a decade, her albums were barely scraping the charts, and many saw her as a relic from an earlier era. Even with a limited audience, though, she kept recording new material and garnered a few raves from critics ? when they bothered to listen at all.

In short, Lauper has stayed hungry. And there was no better proof of it than Tuesday, when she sounded hardly like a millionaire whose greatest-hits album came out 12 years ago.

After an opening set by 1980s punk-rockers Wall of Voodoo, Lauper sashayed onstage in a spangled skirt and tights and barely stopped moving for the next 90 minutes. Her set was eclectic, combining old hits with recent nonhits and classic covers, but what united the whole show was the sheer conviction of her performance.

Lauper, I might note, is 53 and a wife and mother ? and put on a set that might exhaust the average 21-year-old. Throughout the up-tempo numbers, she glided around the stage, jumped, punched the air, draped herself around her bassist’s leg, reclined seductively on the piano, even slipped into the front rows to sing and dance with her fans.

Sometimes, when a song crashed to a close, she swung her entire upper half forward as if shaking some demon out of her system. And oh, can she hit those wailing high notes. Blazing through “Money Changes Everything,” “True Colors” and other venerable classics, she sounded like she hadn’t aged a day, or gotten the least bit bored, in 20 years.

A show like this demonstrates why people dream of rock stardom in the first place ? why they pack those clubs seven nights a week, counting tips and singing to half-empty rooms. Whether or not you’re the latest hot commodity, if you can play with this much vigor to a packed, adoring crowd ? well, there have got to be worse ways to spend a Tuesday evening.

For the closing number, Lauper performed her signature hit, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” the kind of adolescent anthem that some stars avoid as girlhood becomes a distant memory. Lauper, though, gave it a gala treatment, stretching it to more than 10 minutes and inviting the audience to chant along. At one point, between verses, she told a story of her pre-stardom days when she struggled to be a competent waitress.

“I used to cry when I got fired,” she mused. Then, after a pause, she shouted, “Thank God I got fired!”

As everyone who filled the Pacific Amphitheatre might have said, Amen.dpt.23-millermug-CPhotoInfoRK1T7ECD20060723iq4murknCredit: Caption: (LA)