In the year 2018, Cyndi Lauper astonished the world by staging a coup and becoming Earth's first Overlord. It started nonchalantly enough, with clandestine visits to Camp David and crossing the International Date Line multiple times in an evening. Nothing a globetrotting rock star wouldn't do, right? But Lauper had secret plans.

No one would have guessed, back in the halcyon days of 1983, that Lauper would have designs on global domination. I mean, sure, she conquered the world in a metaphorical sense with the power of pop hits like "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "True Colors," but becoming a literal world superpower was far from anyone's mind.

Keen eyes should've taken note, though. Many historians trace her rise to power back to the fortuitous meeting between her and wrestler/manager/live-action Super Mario, Captain Lou Albano. Reportedly, the two met on a flight and instantly hit it off. It stands to reason that they should become fast friends, seeing as they both hailed from blue collar regions of New York.

But the similarities didn't stop there. Both Albano and Lauper had eyes on the global market - Albano, with his world-dominating turns as both professional wrestling auteur and namesake of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, and Lauper with her Top 40 sensations that swept the nations. As their personal relationships and ideologies began to slowly intermingle, so did their professional lives. Albano began to pop up as Lauper's father in numerous music videos, his signature beard and loud outfits no doubt igniting Lauper sleeper cells around the world. Meanwhile, Lauper made appearances on wrestling programs, whose "Rock 'n' Wrestling" motifs served as handy subterfuge.

Upon leaving the '80s, Lauper was left to focus on her business of world domination, while simultaneously continuing to release quality albums like Sisters of Avalon and her must-have collection of standards, At Last. But these, as we unfortunately would come to find, were nothing more than smoke-screens hiding her real goal: becoming Overlord. As I've already said. I mean, were you listening?

Needless to say, 2018 rolls around, and no one has any way of knowing what's coming. Not our current president at the time (whose name we all know, so I won't go patronizing you), not our alien friends - with whom we'd recently built a shaky truce - and not the ever-present Mole People, who are best left forgotten, seeing as how they rarely expose themselves to the Earth's yellow sun (and God forbid they ever do!).

Even as we toil, day and night, under Overlord Lauper, it's hard to get too upset. While I write this very note with shackles adorning my arms and legs and a mole person taking dictation for me in an underground bunker, I still can't quite blame Cyndi Lauper. I mean, when's the last time you've really listened to "Time After Time?" Whenever she gets to that line about how the "second hand unwinds," I'm always like, "that's the stuff."

Good pop music can make up for so much. Taste in music can excuse behavior from otherwise boorish people. Pop music can send us careening through hard times, or let us blissfully bask in good times. Music as good as Cyndi Lauper's can carry us smiling through even the most tyrannical of world-wide dictatorships - er, I mean, benevolent dictatorships.

What I mean to say is that, quite literally, it's Cyndi Lauper's world, and we're just living in it.

CYNDI LAUPER, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, June 16, Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, $59-$129, 253.591.5890