Cyndi Lauper Just Wants to Have Fun at Moda Center One Last Time

Cyndi Lauper is still the coolest girl in the room. Easily. On her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour on Saturday, Nov. 30, the pop icon played a generous two-hour show enhanced by long storytelling segments and visual art collaborations. And if this indeed is Lauper’s farewell tour, she went out with a (confetti) bang.

“I wasn’t paying attention and all of a sudden, I was like, oh shit, how old am I?” she said in her well-preserved New York accent. (She’s 71, if you can believe it.)

Also still completely intact: the wonderfully bratty curl of her upper lip when she sings, her ability to scream and roll around on the stage when called for (as seen during “Money Changes Everything”), and her sense of style. She managed to be hot, cutting edge and classy in her half-dozen or so looks, many of which were designed by Christian Siriano and referenced the mid-1980s “I Want My MTV” era.

Lauper’s pop career apexed that decade with her big three: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “True Colors” and “Time After Time.” Besides those, the back catalog is pretty thin. She wisely compensated with storytelling breaks about her childhood and her career, almost veering into a biography-meets-theater-meets-pop format, à la Springsteen on Broadway. It worked.

Upping the ante further were her visual art collaborations, such as the very cool art installation Air Fountain by Daniel Wurtzel that she brought out for two songs. Sheer fabrics—a rainbow for “True Colors,” naturally—tornadoed and fluttered around the stage in a channel of wind. For the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” encore, everything was covered with Yayoi Kusama’s signature polka dots.

“This was my gift to you guys ’cuz I figured I won’t be doing this again and I wanted it to be pretty,” she said of the tour. “And it’s pretty amazing.” Facts.