Cyndi Lauper may still know how to have fun-but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t use a pick-me-up.

Hours before her Sunday evening performance at the Great New York State Fair, Lauper stopped to order a tall soy latte, said Starbucks employee Sydney Steele, 21, who attended the concert that night.

‘It looked like she was an SU mom,’ Steele said, her long earrings bobbing.

Steele, along with about 3000 other surprisingly older fans relived the days of the ’80s on Sunday, filling the area surrounding the Chevrolet Court concert venue at the Fair.

Lauper seemed to hardly have aged since the height of her fame in the mid-1980s, but she ditched the bright pink tulle skirts and fluorescent-colored sneakers and jewelry from her heydays in favor of a classic black knee-length pleated skirt, and a sheer V-neck ruffled collared shirt layered over a black tank top.

Her voice ripped through the crowd, alternately low and sultry, and then shrill and poppy, as if her best-known 1985 song, ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun,’ had just hit the top of the charts yesterday.

‘Happy Labor Day everybody,’ Lauper breathed, her New Jersey/New York City accent reverberating into the microphone. She then took a guitar, adjusted a stool in the center of the stage and began a cover of ‘Walk on By,’ followed by a slow-paced rendition of ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’

Throughout her set, Lauper performed covers and tracks from her more recent works. Some moments seemed inspired by Amy Mann and Tori Amos-who may have in fact been inspired by Lauper-with her Amos-like throaty wails and staccato breathiness like Mann.

While audience members waited patiently for the songs they had truly come to hear, they halfheartedly clapped and a few whistled at the end of each song that they could not mouth each word to.

‘Is this all she does?’ said one fan in the crowd.

‘You’d think she’d be playing her oldies but goodies,’ said Heather Stoutenberg, 20, of Oswego, who only knew Lauper’s hits.

Lauper and the rest of her four-member band riled the crowd a bit more with Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On,’ which, in their rendition, sounded eerily similar to Prince’s ‘Purple Rain.’

Her hip gyrations and close-eyed dips with the mic escalated as she repeated the main chorus, her guitarist echoing her words. She ended the song kneeling, pressing herself to the floor.

Then Lauper began ‘True Colors,’ a huge hit from 1986, accompanied by an undercurrent of audience voices. She shouted one line, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ then paused, the audience erupting in whoops and whistles, before finishing.

Moments after beginning the up-tempo ‘It’s Hard to Be Me’ from her album ‘Shine,’ she told the band to stop. Then, randomly, she turned to the audience and asked, ‘Underwear?’ and spanned her hands over her chest and crotch area. And, as quickly as she began her quirky tangent, she and the band launched back into the song.

Some younger fans, dressed in miniskirts, blinding-colored T-shirts, and side-ponytails, began to get impatient with Lauper for avoiding the hits that made her famous.

‘I’m hoping it gets better,’ said Annie Gustafson, 19, of Cortland, playing with the knot tied in the side of her shirt. ‘We were looking forward to this for like two weeks. And our ’80s clothes.’

‘Our dress does not match the concert,’ added Gustafson, who was born the year Lauper’s first single made airwaves. ‘[The concert] is not ’80s enough.’

Then Lauper snuck ‘Time After Time,’ another greatest hit, into her playlist. With her drawn-out, unfamiliar introduction, the audience almost didn’t recognize it.

Upon finishing the song, Lauper-who’d clearly realized that she could make fans stay for the entire show if she saved the best for last-finally began her best-known anthem.

Fans waved their hands, sat on friends’ shoulders, shouted and whistled to the slightly more guitar and violin-tinged version of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.’ They volleyed ‘just wanna’ back and forth with Lauper, then chanted it on their own while Lauper improvised. The blue, purple, red and orange lights blitzed the stage, and Lauper ran around, at times standing on the piano.

Then Lauper called it a night.

‘Have a great year,’ Lauper said, waving as she left the stage. ‘Take good care of yourself.’

Published on September 6, 2004 at 12:00 pm