Music: These Big Girls Don't Cry

Wait, wait. Wait! Don't go away yet. "I think," laughs Cyndi Lauper, "we all need a break from me."

Oh.

"I think she's a victim of overexposure," says Freddy DeMann. Freddy manages Madonna, not Cyndi, and frets--is, in fact, "absolutely worried"-- that all the p.r. heat might burn out his client. Now, then. While the ladies play tag with the limelight, a few thoughts occur.

Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, for anyone without access to electric entertainment of any form, has become the first debut album in history to rack up four top-five singles. Name those tunes and, very likely, you can sing a chorus, along with all the Lauper loopies who cover the age spectrum, from dress-alike five-year-olds to grannies gone groovy: All Through the Night; She Bop, which inverted Gene Vincent's classic Be-Bop-a-Lula into a thoroughly unapologetic paean to female autoeroticism; Time After Time; and Girls Just Want to Have Fun, a kind of antic feminist anthem that helped get Cyndi on the cover of Ms. as one of its women of the year. No other woman has made an album at any point in her career that launched so many heavy hits.

Lauper is nominated for five Grammies, including Best New Artist. She is also a) nice to her mom, with whom she frequently appears in photos and whom she cast in three of her wacky videos; b) tireless, until very recently, in her pursuit of media exposure (appearances during the past six months have included telethons and Dr. Ruth Westheimer's TV sex-advice show); and c) a wrestling fan, who has shown up at ringside to bait her sometime buddy, Captain Lou Albano, with a rush of feminist banter and a fan's hortatory impertinence.

Cyndi Lauper is the manic outsider in every high school class--brassy and sensitive, dippy and shrewd--whose hair seems to have been colored by a box of melted Crayolas and who dresses in the kinds of duds gypsies might wear if they had proms. Part Piaf, part Little Peggy March, she also has a razzle- dazzle, multi-octave range, a voice that can coax a broken promise out of a ballad or pin a rocker right to the mat. She has the whole package. But Madonna has the look.

Madonna--or Madonna Louise Ciccone, as her birth certificate reads in Bay City, Mich.--has an action-packed body, always prominently on display, and doleful, knowing eyes that seem to encourage every male fantasy of lust with no limits. "Baby Dietrich!" exclaimed Glamour Photographer Francesco Scavullo as he shot a fashion layout of the abrasively photogenic young (24) woman. If she could get her voice around a song the way she moves her shape for the camera, she would be pure nitro.