Julia Gets Wise with Cyndi Lauper
6/24/20261 hr 5 min
This week on Wiser Than Me, Julia sits down with 73-year-old style and music legend Cyndi Lauper. The pair talk premonitions, pop hits, and why she thinks she owes Steven Spielberg a decades-overdue apology note. From singing in the shower as a kid to writing the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, Cyndi talks about her creative chaos, and standing up to anyone who tells her to “just sing.” She opens up about marriage, activism, and why flowers apparently wave back when you’re famous. Plus, Julia and her 92-year-old mom Judy discuss Julia’s childhood psychic powers.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJulia Louis-Dreyfus· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Lemonada. Yeah, I, I'm not sure how we got here, but all of a sudden, we live in a world where facts are disputed. They're drowned in noise, and then they're weaponized. It's like there's this, this, this attack on our ability to trust what we perceive, and then confusion and a kind of numbed stupefaction are the result. But art does the opposite, I think. Art makes its argument through feeling, and feeling stubbornly can't be controlled. History can be rewritten and heroes removed, but it's harder to erase how people react to a novel or a painting or a movie. I mean, that's why they used to sneak rock and roll into the Soviet Union. People needed that forbidden feeling. When there's so much propaganda and chaos, the artist's job gets more essential and, frankly, more dangerous. I, I used to think that there was no way that people would really riot at those old Ibsen plays back in the day. But now, I mean, I can see how a good play set in, say, Gaza or on the first tee at Mar-a-Lago might cause a bit of a fuss. When our government sees artists as the enemy, when, like, portraitist