Cyndi Lauper

Tuesday night at the Chestnut Cabaret, Cyndi Lauper turned her back on the past and started from scratch. "Due to these mitigating circumstances, this show's gonna be different, but different is good," she said in her trademark Queens squawk. "Tonight is a scientific experiment, a debut for something you can't buy - at least not for a while. We decided to take the music to the people, so here it is - the new record. " She wasn't kidding. Lauper - who bounded to pop stardom in the mid-'80s with a string of hits that were both effervescently giddy and tenderly fragile ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "She Bop," "Time After Time" and "All Through the Night")

In this corner, sleekly clad in sparkles, spandex or tough-cookie leather - your typical Top-40 female. And in the opposite corner, chaotically coifed and dressed in the overflow of the nearest dumpster - Cyndi Lauper. One merely cuffs the ears with programmed punches, a synthesized songbird. The other aims for the heart, with an animal sound that suggests she's the real macaw. What's the worst career move Cyndi Lauper ever made? Far worse than the lengthy delays between albums - almost three years between her quadruple- platinum debut She's So Unusual and 1986's True Colors and another three before last week's release of A Night to Remember?

How many times have you gotten really psyched for a live show - based on the musical act's fairly magnificent album - only to find the concert falling short of your expectations? The problem is that as the craft of producing records keeps improving, mere mortals can readily be transformed into "supermusicians. " In today's computerized studio, it's no big deal for a producer to splice together phrases from different vocal takes to get the ideal performance. And simple- minded melodies can be dressed up with super-fidelity recording of rhythmic and textural "subplots" - the instrumental nuances that create a rich dramatic atmosphere.

Lingering over dinner, alternating between glasses of light beer and cognac, Robert Hazard is talking about his early career in music as if referring to a previous incarnation. He recalls his achievements, which left him an overnight - if short-lived - millionaire, with self-deprecating nonchalance, and appears comfortable only when discussing his new band. Along with the A's, the Hooters and Pretty Poison, Hazard, 41, was a front- runner on the Philly music scene during the heady days of the early '80s.

Victor Kelly (Christopher Walken) is trying to walk the straight and narrow. An ex-convict who fixes cars in a rundown Queens garage, Vic shares a small house with his grown daughter (Vera Framiga), whom he didn't know while he was in prison for all those years. He struggles to keep his aunt, Diedre (Anne Pitoniak), in a rest home run by nuns. But lately he's been bouncing the checks, and the sisters aren't showing much mercy. In The Opportunists, a small slice of stumblebum life written and directed by newcomer Myles Connell, Vic succumbs to temptation.

Cyndi Lauper, whose True Colors album and single have rocketed up the charts, makes her first Spectrum concert appearance tonight. It's no fluke that Lauper's new LP - her first since 1983 when her debut She's So Unusual sold zillions - is doing well: The record is a deft mix of beguiling ballads, breezy rockers and quirky pop tunes. Lauper has been on tour for some time now in Japan and Australia, prior to returning to the States for a cross-country concert swing. So it's fair to expect that the singer - an affable eccentric with a voice that runs the gamut from a Betty Boop squeak to a deep, murmury croon - will be in top form live, offering selections from her hit albums and then some.

Ryan O'Neal was an unqualified hit in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday. He was defending himself against a $3 million suit by a Fifth Avenue hotel security guard who said he was hit in the eye by glass from a shattered soda bottle that the movie star threw at a photographer outside the hotel six years ago. O'Neal, 45, testifying that the bottle slipped from his hand, flirted with the four women on the six-member jury, and, looking over the shoulder of...

"Achoo! Excuse me, I just sneezed in the cat's face. " The dainty sniffles were a surprise, but that voice - with its thick, nasal Queens accent - was unmistakable. It was Cyndi Lauper speaking by phone from Manhattan recently, just a few days before heading off on a concert tour of Japan. "I'm so happy," she said. "The tickets for the Japan shows went on sale during a hurricane and they still sold out in three hours. Japan is one of my favorite places; the fans are so enthusiastic.

Marie Labosky and her teammates decided on their theme song during an elevator ride with Cyndi Lauper in August. Labosky, a Germantown Academy senior, was in Minneapolis for the United States Senior National swimming championships at the University of Minnesota. Lauper, the pop-music icon of the 1980s, stepped in and out of Labosky's life in a few seconds, but her music has lived on with the Patriots. "She was there with blue hair," Labosky said with a laugh. Chlorine is also known to turn the hair strange colors, but Labosky and Lauper didn't exchange advice on that matter.

Robert Hazard, 59, whose regional hits such as "Escalator of Life" made him one of the most prominent Philadelphia rock acts of the 1980s and whose song "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" was turned into a massively popular feminist anthem by Cyndi Lauper, died Tuesday night. Mr. Hazard, a Philadelphia native who was raised in Springfield, Delaware County, died unexpectedly after surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, his wife, Susan, confirmed yesterday. The singer and songwriter, who in recent years operated antique shops in Old Forge, N.Y., and Vero Beach, Fla., was born Robert Rimato, the son of Umberto Rimato, who sang with the Philadelphia Opera Company.

PAUL McCARTNEY's new wife, Heather Mills, has accepted $76,000 in damages from a British newspaper. Now, maybe she and Paul can fill out that china pattern. The money was offered to settle her libel claim after a May 12 article in the Sunday Mirror alleged the Charity Commission was investigating her over money collected for an Indian earthquake amputees' appeal in 2001. In a statement, Mills's lawyer said she planned to donate the damages money to the charity Adopt-A-Minefield UK. In other McCartney news: The reason Paul had to postpone his Kennedy Center Honor until next year is due to his niece's wedding.

Victor Kelly (Christopher Walken) is trying to walk the straight and narrow. An ex-convict who fixes cars in a rundown Queens garage, Vic shares a small house with his grown daughter (Vera Framiga), whom he didn't know while he was in prison for all those years. He struggles to keep his aunt, Diedre (Anne Pitoniak), in a rest home run by nuns. But lately he's been bouncing the checks, and the sisters aren't showing much mercy. In The Opportunists, a small slice of stumblebum life written and directed by newcomer Myles Connell, Vic succumbs to temptation.

Marie Labosky and her teammates decided on their theme song during an elevator ride with Cyndi Lauper in August. Labosky, a Germantown Academy senior, was in Minneapolis for the United States Senior National swimming championships at the University of Minnesota. Lauper, the pop-music icon of the 1980s, stepped in and out of Labosky's life in a few seconds, but her music has lived on with the Patriots. "She was there with blue hair," Labosky said with a laugh. Chlorine is also known to turn the hair strange colors, but Labosky and Lauper didn't exchange advice on that matter.

When rock-and-rollers have used the word baby over the years, it's been as a term of affection or seduction, as in the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way," or Bread's "Baby I'm-a Want You. " For a growing number of pop musicians, however, baby talk is less about romance and more about formula. To them, baby simply signifies, well, baby, as in infant. "I never thought too hard about being a mom and housewife," says Kim Gordon, the singer and bassist with Sonic Youth, one of the most influential American rock bands of the last two decades.

Cyndi Lauper is the untutored poet of the New York streets. Her speech rings with the "ya gottas" and "ya haftas" of the hardscrabble outer boroughs. Her head swims with the images of ignorance and abuse she encountered growing up there. Lauper, the colorful urban urchin who skipped and pranced her way through the city, outfitted in rainbow hues (and with rainbow hair), in her "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" video nearly 10 years ago, lives by a peaceful pond in Connecticut now with her husband.

Tuesday night at the Chestnut Cabaret, Cyndi Lauper turned her back on the past and started from scratch. "Due to these mitigating circumstances, this show's gonna be different, but different is good," she said in her trademark Queens squawk. "Tonight is a scientific experiment, a debut for something you can't buy - at least not for a while. We decided to take the music to the people, so here it is - the new record. " She wasn't kidding. Lauper - who bounded to pop stardom in the mid-'80s with a string of hits that were both effervescently giddy and tenderly fragile ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "She Bop," "Time After Time" and "All Through the Night")

Lingering over dinner, alternating between glasses of light beer and cognac, Robert Hazard is talking about his early career in music as if referring to a previous incarnation. He recalls his achievements, which left him an overnight - if short-lived - millionaire, with self-deprecating nonchalance, and appears comfortable only when discussing his new band. Along with the A's, the Hooters and Pretty Poison, Hazard, 41, was a front- runner on the Philly music scene during the heady days of the early '80s.

In this corner, sleekly clad in sparkles, spandex or tough-cookie leather - your typical Top-40 female. And in the opposite corner, chaotically coifed and dressed in the overflow of the nearest dumpster - Cyndi Lauper. One merely cuffs the ears with programmed punches, a synthesized songbird. The other aims for the heart, with an animal sound that suggests she's the real macaw. What's the worst career move Cyndi Lauper ever made? Far worse than the lengthy delays between albums - almost three years between her quadruple- platinum debut She's So Unusual and 1986's True Colors and another three before last week's release of A Night to Remember?

Cyndi Lauper keeps interrupting Vibes to hold extended conversations with a sort of guardian angel from the next world. Any angel who had earned its wings surely would have told Lauper that the problem with doing a bad Goldie Hawn imitation is that that is what Goldie Hawn has been reduced to these days. Because of her enormous success as a rock star, Lauper has been deluged with screenplays, and she says she has turned all of them down before Vibes for offering dingbat characters.