Cerrando Circulos: On Old Chapters Closing, New Chapters Opening

Yesterday was my final day at work at Boston University, where I’ve been working since May 2013.

I got to campus early and headed to Life Alive to have some coffee and finish up a couple thank you notes I had yet to write for my team. And as I was sitting there at the bar, waiting for my coffee, writing my note to my mentor Sara Rimer, Michael Kiwanuka’s song Home Again came on. In that exact moment, I had literally been thinking: It has been so helpful for me to have a woman like Sara in my life, especially with my mother gone.

That song came on and I was knocked off my feet. It was like being swept away by a wave.

I first heard that song years ago, right after my mother died. I remember it so clearly. I was sitting on a bean bag chair in Restoration Hardware and it came on. These lyrics pierced my heart like an arrow:

Home again
Home again
One day I know
I'll feel home again
Born again
Born again
One day I know
I'll feel strong again

In that time of my life, I was so broken and so lost. I missed my mother so much and I had so many regrets that wracked my heart about what I could have done differently while she was alive. And I remember hearing the words of that song and just longing to feel that way again someday. Home again. Strong again. Feeling so very far away—like I was looking at that state of being from a distant shore.

Seven years later, sitting at the counter of Life Alive, it came on. And I realized I felt that way. Home. Strong. So grateful for where I am in my life, who I have in my life, and where I am and where I’m heading.

I have literally never heard that song in public any other time but those two—Restoration Hardware and Life Alive, yesterday.

And this is why I believe in everything. Believe in magic, believe my mother is still shining up there and keeping tabs on me, believe in the starry connections, fairy dust, the whole thing.

In a moment the light switched off and it was only stars for miles.

Untitled, or, The Spark of Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe is happy to be here. 

That's the impression I get as I'm sitting in the bucket seats of BU's Tsai Performance Center on Comm Ave. Dafoe has come clomping out from backstage with Dean Harvey Young, the College of Fine Arts' newest dean, and he's smiling.

The whole auditorium is abuzz to see and hear the actor who donated his archives to BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. Dafoe is here tonight to be in conversation with Dean Harvey as part of the Friends Speaker Series.

I'm abuzz too. I'm here to listen to, and be in the same room as, the man who has startled and delighted me throughout the years with not only the work choices he's made, but the way he has brought the roles to life.

“When you’re hanging on to who you think you are, it can block you, and prevent you from living life.”

I first saw Dafoe when he played Paul Smecker, an eloquent, outside-the-box FBI agent-turned-vigilante in one of my top five movies of all time, The Boondock Saints. Dafoe knocked me flat with his strange inhabitation of Agent Smecker. He was strange, he was unpredictable, he was real. It was unlike anything I'd seen before from an actor. Throughout the years, he's popped up in other movies, and always arrested and surprised me with his spark--The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Spider-Man and others.

Tonight, Dafoe looks like Wolverine with his wild hair and cut cheekbones and jawline.

The talk begins.

Dean Harvey peppers Dafoe with questions about where he's come from--Wisconsin (though Dafoe is quick to point out his mother's from Dorchester and his father attended Harvard Med School)--and how he got his start in acting (highlighting his involvement in community theatre and the Wooster Group in New York). The conversation is light and easy, and they invite questions from the crowd. On life and his craft, Dafoe offers wisdom like drops of rain: 

• [On the process of acting] Invest in the finding out. Cleanse yourself of expectations.
• [When acting] My ambition is to be like an animal--natural, graceful.
• [On working with first-time actors in the Florida Project:] It was fun to be around people who didn't have a shtick.
• [On how he finds happiness:] I find happiness disappearing into a certain role. [I find happiness] when I'm not there anymore and I lose myself.
• When you're hanging on to who you think you are, it can block you, and prevent you from living life.

Dafoe's desire to explore human fallibility, our human-ness, what we're made of--this vibrates. He puts it that he wants to "shine the light on what the truth is". His energy, his humility, his presence, his way--I find myself thinking of it all days later, and nodding as I wait for the green line train.