The Universe Loves Me: Billy Jack Goodwin’s Journey of Service

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching our video podcast Radio Maine, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today I have with me Billy Jack Goodwin. He is many things, but among them, a program leader for Port Resources at AIM, which is Achieving Independence in Maine, Port Place in Portland, Maine. You're such an interesting person, Billy Jack, I don't even really know where to start, but first I'll start with thanking you for being here. Thanks for coming to our little island. So I have to set the stage for people who would be like, how did you even meet this guy? Well, I was standing there at one of our Portland Art Gallery openings looking at a piece on the wall, and you came over and you're like, what do you think of this piece? Do you know if that artist is here? I was like, I have no idea who this person is. He seems super friendly, and you and I just struck up a conversation. I learned a little bit more about you, and I was like, wow, you are really connecting to people through your creativity and your love of art. So talk to me about how you ended up in the Portland Art Gallery in the first place.

Billy Jack Goodwin: Well, I love art and I love the Portland Art Gallery in general. I've been a fan of art since I was a child. My mom used to take me. We come from Lewiston. I was born in Lewiston, and once a year we would come up for the Sidewalk Art Festival, which was a big thing for us, to come to Portland and go out to eat and then go see all the beautiful art. I love art in all forms. That's spoken word, performance, painting. I just love art. As far as art in Portland, it's always been a part of my life. I've lived in the Portland area for what, 20 years, and art has always been a big part of our lives. Me and my wife, we always go to all the First Friday art walks and we love to meet the artist.

And after COVID everything shrunk down in the arts community a little bit because a lot of studios closed, but I feel like Portland Gallery and Cove Street and Green Hut, these beautiful galleries who have really excellent curators where they can move stuff every month, where you feel like everything's fresh and new and fun and clean, it's just a beautiful place where you can go and have a night of inspiration and look at this beautiful work and be the artist. I bring that into my own personal work and my personal life. So I really enjoy it and enjoy the community.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that you talked about in the pre-work that we ask people to do, so that we get a little bit of background, is how you are very intentional about trying to keep yourself in a position of essentially being upward. And the word positive gets kind of a bad rap these days.

Billy Jack Goodwin: Sometimes it does, yes.

Lisa Belisle: But being very intentional about showing up and being positive, and I think this is particularly important for somebody who does the type of work that you do, because you've done a lot of nonprofit work.

Billy Jack Goodwin: 30 years, it's been my whole life.

Lisa Belisle: And you're working with very vulnerable populations, but they're populations that don't need people feeling sorry for them.

Billy Jack Goodwin: No.

Lisa Belisle: They need people to show up and be positive and to say, hey, we're all going to move forward in a really good direction together. So let's start with the nonprofit piece. Why nonprofits? What type of nonprofit focuses have you had over the years?

Billy Jack Goodwin: Well, I'll start with just, and it's funny, I think I carried shame with this when I was younger, but the universe loves me. The universe loves me. I have a beautiful relationship with it. I was able to have conversations with the universe, and not in a crazy kind of way, but I always feel, I always tell people, if you know me, I always talk about, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be here. I always have this feeling since forever. The only way I can explain it, it's like a train station and the train is full, and I'm sitting at the train station and the first class is full and the economy's full, and maybe there's even people hanging out, and that train is leaving the station now. I'm totally comfortable that this train is leaving the station. And at the last second someone said, oh, we got an extra ticket, and someone pushed me. And I entered that train and I entered this world, and I really felt happy and grateful my entire life. It sounds kind of weird to say that, but I was born into, I have wonderful parents, my mom and dad who are older, they weren't expecting to have me. My brother is 10 years older than me. He's been a therapist for people in college at Williams College in Massachusetts. My sister's a school teacher, and I just was born into a family of love.

The most important thing that they did was teach me how to give and receive love. I think in my 30 years of working with people, this is where people struggled the most. And love is a powerful word, and I've seen, especially in my work, it twisted in multiple ways. But what it really is, is energy. How can you get energy from people, positive energy? How do I give that out to people? How do I collect it? How do I use that to better my life personally and achieve all the little goals that I have, but also focus it toward helping and uplifting other people? And if I focus on helping and uplifting other people, all these other things in my life just get enhanced. I've always had this mentality, and I wish I came up with it by myself, but I was raised in this.

My mother is just, I was raised by a wonderful woman and a wonderful father in a very interesting town of Lewiston, Maine, at a very interesting time. And my mom was an emergency room nurse at CMMC for 40 years. She is the nurse of nurses. She really was. And Lewiston is a beautiful town, the Beauty Lou, but it's sometimes, when I grew up, cartoonishly violent. And my mom is just a wonderful spiritual woman and a true feminist, not in the way of, she's like a hippie woman, she's just a beautiful spiritual woman who gave her passion to her work and her life and her family. And when she wasn't doing that, she would give her work and passion to our church, and she would give her work and passion to the community of Lewiston. So I literally grew up seeing this all the time.

She's an amazing woman. We could talk about that a little bit. But also, I grew up in Lewiston, which is a very interesting town. We could do a 10 part series just on the energy that Lewiston pumps out and the history of that town. But my life really circulated around a four block area of Lewiston, which is statistically the poorest area in New England. It's a lot of poverty, for years, for generations in that area. In that area is two places. One is Calvary Methodist Church, which was my mother's church, and next to it was a little tavern called the Blue Goose Tavern, which is a Bates bar, which was my father's church. So I grew up with this dichotomy of my father, who grew up in Lewiston, very tough descendants of mill workers and railroad workers, and my mother who's just this beautiful spiritual person.

And somehow they met and created this beautiful family. So I was very lucky with that. The church which I grew up in is Calvary Methodist Church. And Lewiston, when I was growing up, the whole town was probably 75% Catholic and French. We have a beautiful basilica there, very Catholic town, and our little Methodist church. And when I say church or growing up in the church, I think people have ideas about that, maybe negative ideas. My church experience was beautiful. No one ever hurt me. It was just a community of people from all walks of life who use the power of God and the conduit of the teachings of Jesus to do amazing things in their community. And I knew from a very early age that a call to worship is a call to service. And those two things work hand in hand, and it was just beautiful people doing beautiful work.

By the time I'm 13, 14 years old, I see this, I acknowledge this, these people use the power of God to do wonderful things. But I'm 13, 14, I'm not into Jesus. I don't even listen to my dad, let alone listening to Jesus. So it's so funny, I think I could have gone in multiple directions at that time. As a teenager I got big very quick. So I was like a warrior from the Lord of the Rings, from Game of Thrones. I was just very big, very uncomfortable in my body and very sad when I was a teenage kid. So it's amazing how life works, and if bad influences would've come into my life at that time, I don't know what would've happened. But the universe loves me, and good things happened to me. So when I was looking for something, art came into my life as a teenager. And my brother, who's 10 years older than me, he was already off to college by the time I'm even having cognitive thoughts. I'm eight years old, nine years old, so I don't have a relationship with him as a child.

We've become friends as I've become an adult. But he made me a mix tape when I was a kid. And my first job, I was working at Quality Market in Lewiston, Maine, 13, 14 years old, stocking beer shelves. And I had this tape that my brother sent me from college. And on this tape was, this is going to sound like probably the whitest thing you've ever heard on this podcast, but it was the Grateful Dead. And I remember listening to it. I remember for the first time hearing music that would fit who my spirit was. I couldn't have been a goth kid. I'm too big and redhead and smiley to be a goth kid, and I'm not tough enough to love rock and roll music. But that music was so artistically inspiring to me. And once you open up your world to stuff, people will come into that world.

So the people who happen to love that kind of music are very nice spiritual people. And I'm not much of a hallucinogenic or drug user. I really love the spirit of it and the art of it. So beautiful people started coming into my life and teaching me new things and giving me books and philosophy. Back in those days in the nineties, it wasn't like today, where if you really wanted to get into it, you would have to put the effort in to learn about philosophy. It's not given to you like YouTube now. And for some reason, it really connected to me. And then my world starts getting bigger and I start meeting more people. At the same time, my mother, who's doing amazing work in the community, helped to open a shelter called Norwich House. So a little thing about Lewiston is we have a long history of trauma and sadness that runs through that city.

It just is. And homelessness, back in the nineties, if you were an adult homeless person, you would go to Portland for services. In Lewiston, all people would come to Lewiston, like teenage kids. So there's so many rural towns like Buckfield and Turner. If you're in an abusive situation, you would come to Lewiston because there's a community of homeless people and services. This has always been that way. Lewiston has been a town of vice forever. It just has been. So there's vice, there's sex trafficking and drugs and things like that. And these kids came into the town. There were a lot of flop houses, there were a lot of empty mills, there were a lot of places for them to sleep. So there's a community of homeless teenage kids.

My mother working at the hospital, every night they're dealing with girls coming in with just horrible situations. So I learned right there, here's a need. Here's a specific group of people who are struggling. So what you do, you create systems to help these people. To help create a place called Norwich House. It was in downtown Lewiston, and it was for young girls who wanted to keep their babies and street girls. And it's one of these things where if you are a kid who grows up abused, you don't even know what love is or understand that. So that baby inside your stomach, they think it's the key to their love and happiness and connection.

But if you're raising that baby or having that baby in a flop house or in a dirty mill, the chances of having something bad happen are very high. So Norwich House was created in the early nineties to give girls an opportunity to go and do this. Once again, I'm just a teenage kid, so I'm not even understanding what my mom is doing. All I know is that, because I'm so big and so passive in this shelter situation, I'm the only guy that comes in when they need a refrigerator moved. Here's 16-year-old BJ coming in, move a refrigerator and do that kind of stuff. So I'm seeing these girls, I'm meeting these girls, and it's funny because sometimes guys will be like, oh, a whole shelter full of teenage girls. But even at that time, I know these aren't girls who I would have a crush on in my science class.

These girls have been through so much already. And in my yoga study I know now, but I didn't know this at the time, all these young people are just young people with broken root chakras. They have no ability of safety, security, understanding of how to get that, how to lead this. And it was very eye-opening to me at that time, but not like, oh, I'm going to spend my whole life doing this. It was already what, I don't realize that all my life, my mom has been training me. So she led us into this. My mom knew when she brought me to that shelter, what I was going to see, she led her hands into the darkness. So we would have an understanding of that. Me and my brother and my sister, all in different times, we had to do volunteering, candy striping.

So I don't realize it, but my whole life, I'm almost in training for what my passion's going to be. So I get out of high school, I don't know what I want to do with my life, and I feel this overwhelming passion. I want to serve. I just want to serve. I don't know in what capacity, but like I said, my whole life, I just had this wanting to serve. I didn't want to do the military, because I just don't want to hurt anybody. I didn't think I wanted to get into the ministry, because I just didn't have that connection. So it's interesting, I think if I was a kid today, I could see myself, if someone just would've come into my life and put me in the wrong direction, I would've taken all this passion I have and it would've gone the wrong direction.

But it didn't work that way. The universe loves me and it brought beautiful people into my life. And one of these beautiful people was a man named Bob Rowe. I don't mean to cry about these things, I don't talk about this very often. But Bob Rowe in my mind is a hero. And a lot of people I'll talk about today are kind of like invisible sons, where they are people in your community that change the lives of thousands of people, but you'll never hear about them. They don't run for political office, they're not trying to make it a money thing. They have a passion to help people, and they create these beautiful programs. So a man named Bob Rowe, who was really my first mentor, is the executive director. He was, until 2016, of a program called New Beginnings, which is a beautiful nonprofit in Lewiston, Maine, that focuses on helping teenage kids find a path in their lives.

And they've been doing this since the 1970s. So when you're raising money or trying to help teenage kids, it's the lowest group, it's almost impossible to find money for people to give to homeless kids. Just like, oh, they're kids, or they're just all those damn teenage kids. It's a tremendously hard group to advocate for. I'm sorry, I don't mean to ramble, but anyway, at 18 years old or 17 years old, I'm in the mix of what am I going to do with my life. This man, Bob Rowe, came into my life. I was helping to get services at this program. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do, and he brought me into the shelter program. So they have a shelter program that's still there. They have an outreach program that's downtown Lewiston, and they have an independent program for kids afterwards to give them apartments.

And once again, they've been doing this since the 1970s, helping this population. They run $20,000 in debt every single year. They hold it together with duct tape. But this program is beautiful. And Bob Rowe saw a talent in me and he put me to work at their drop-in center in downtown Lewiston. And at first I felt like a bouncer, there's a lot of fights, a lot of these kids coming in. It was a day program. It was open from two to six, and kids can come in, get some food, get some clean clothes, get condoms, whatever they need for their life. And I ran this whole place at 18 years old. I'm literally the same age as these kids. And because I knew the girls at my mom's shelter, all these kids accepted me as somebody who could help them.

And it was an amazing job and an amazing time in my life. And I knew what I was going to do. And once I got into that, the ball started rolling. Bob helped me become an advocate. So I would go to Augusta, I would advocate for homeless rights. By 19, I'm on the board of directors of New Beginnings, the major nonprofit. I'm meeting people, I'm meeting politicians. I'm understanding how the system works. At that time it's the 1990s, Bill Clinton is president, and they have a brand new program called AmeriCorps and the VISTA program. It is still to this day one of the greatest programs our government ever did. It got shut down by George Bush and really got hammered a couple of months ago by Trump. But it was a domestic Peace Corps for young people like me who are idealistic and want to go help save the world.

And it was a program well-funded by Bill Clinton, where you have programs in states where people go into communities and just help, and you earn money for college. And so I got accepted to a program called the Blaine House Service Corps, that's Maine's version of AmeriCorps, run by a beautiful woman named Sandy Goss, who's still doing amazing work in Lewiston Auburn. And the program was revolutionary in juvenile justice, where kids would get arrested for drugs, smoking cigarettes or whatever it is, they'd come to the court system, and instead of getting sent to the juvenile jail or getting fined, for these families who couldn't afford fines in the first place, they were offered to go in and do volunteer work in the community. So we had a hundred different nonprofits and we would take these young people. So we're only in our twenties.

It's a group of 15 of us. Everyone's young, we're all idealistic, we all have nice uniforms. We had a beautiful van and it was awesome. It was like rock and roll social work. And we would have these very tough kids that would come in who got busted for stuff. They would come with us, but they would think we're cool because we're young too. And we would go out and do amazing stuff in the community. We'd build playgrounds, we would work at horse farms, and we're exposing these kids who got in trouble for smoking, and now they feel like they're being punished, but now they're coming and hanging out with all these young people doing positive stuff in their community. It's impactful to them. And then when they finished their time, they came back and they would volunteer and become corps volunteers too.

It was just a beautiful way of helping people and a really exciting part of my life. And I had exposure to so many nonprofits at the time. So I'm 23 years old. I got accepted to the national program. So it was just the Blaine House program, but even at a big national level. And if you were someone who wants to help the community and help the world, this was such an amazing program. I mean, thousands and thousands of young people, we went all over the country doing amazing stuff, and you're very hard pressed to find anyone in the nonprofit world at a high level who doesn't have AmeriCorps VISTA on their resume. There's thousands of us out there who still are out there trying to do the best we can. It was an amazing program. I really wish it didn't get cut.

9/11 really killed it, that program, and the war just sliced it all. And then like I said, Trump just kind of killed it a couple months ago, whatever was left of it, the VISTA programs that were doing amazing work in your community. But anyway, I came back from that program and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I kind of wanted to leave. I was 23 years old, I didn't know if I wanted to stay in the nonprofit world anymore. Not a lot of money living in this world. And so it's funny, I was thinking about going to be a Maine guide and all this stuff. I was 23 years old, and I was dating a girl at the time, and she worked at a place called Spurwink, which was a big program for kids who are wards of the state.

Mom and dad had drug issues. The state has to take these kids in. They have programs all over the place. They had a job for a residential rec director. I'm like, well, maybe I'll come and do this for the summer and then I'll go get my Maine guide license and get out of the nonprofit world. And I get this job. And remember, for the last six, seven years, I've been working with teenage kids. Even when I was at New Beginnings and AmeriCorps, I'm working with really tough teenage kids. And I come to Spurwink and it's all little kids, all like 6, 8, 9. And so I get sent to this first house, and it's in Auburn, Maine. It's called Garfield House. And I drive up and there's this big beautiful house with a big beautiful porch. And there's three little kids out there, cute as buttons.

And these house parents, once again, invisible sons of the nonprofit world, these people who come and run these little residential homes for kids, a lot of them are young couples who get free rent and a free car and free food, but you have to come and work with these children. It's an amazing job. So I go to get this job and the first three days of this job, I'm really connecting to this one kid. We'll call him Tommy, his name wasn't Tommy, we'll call him Tommy. And everyone there kept warning me about this kid. Like, oh, you got to watch over this Tommy kid. He can really blow up. But the first three days, I'm sitting in activities and we're playing Sorry, and football outside. And I'm just thinking, man, this job is easy.

I'll do this for the summer. And one night we're all having dinner and this little kid is having french fries with ketchup and he wants more ketchup. He has a little lisp and he's like, oh, can I have more ketchup? And the house parents are like, no, you've had too much ketchup already. And we're all sitting there and this little boy's face, eight years old, like a cover of a cereal box, cute. And he just sits there for a second and you could see something pass over his face, and he just takes this table that must have weighed 200 pounds, big oak table, and flipped the table right in front of me. And I'm looking around now. Now I'm noticing that everything in this house is heavy dorm room furniture. I'm like, oh. And I'm starting to see what's happening.

The kids who were there, they grab their food and they go into their rooms. The house parents are cool as cucumbers. We called them therapeutic holds at the time. They grabbed the kid, they put him on the ground, he's screaming and yelling, and the words coming out of his mouth are just like a demon. It was crazy. And the house parents go, can you grab his feet and secure him? So I'm grabbing his feet. And this boy turns around and looks right at me and says some terrible things he's going to do to me. This is an 8-year-old little boy. I just couldn't believe it. And just as quickly as it started, it stops, and he calms down and he goes in his room and he's just like, oh, I can't wait to see you tomorrow.

We'll play football. And I go outside and the house parents, it's just wonderful, and I'm only 23. These people are only like 27. And we smoked cigarettes at the time. And I remember I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe what just happened. And these house parents, they could have said anything at this time. They could have said, oh, screw that, these kids are horrible, this place is horrible. They didn't. They looked right at me and they were like, you have no idea what these children have dealt with and what worlds they came into. And they sat me down and had all these files. This is before computers, everything's handwritten. These notes, six years of handwritten therapy notes. And they go, read this, just read these. So that night I just flipped through these books and still, today, it's unfathomable.

It's unfathomable what this little 8-year-old boy had to go through already in his life. Literally by the time he came out of his mother's womb, the people who were supposed to love him and take care of him did nothing but hurt this little boy. And I just remember sitting there, and the universe is always talking to me, and the universe is like, this is where you need to be. This is where you need to be. And for the next 10 years of my life, we built the greatest residential homes you ever see. I'm tremendously proud of the 10 years, we revolutionized how residential work was done at Spurwink, from taking teenage boys, mainstreaming them into high school, following those kids, creating a continuum of care. So instead of that kid being eight years old and bouncing from program to program, no, he's going to stay at Spurwink.

We're going to run right through until he's 17 years old, he's going to have the same staff, where our goal is to make sure that he is getting into the community and experiencing life as much as he can possibly do. We cannot have these kids going through that. They're victims their whole life. Everything opened up and I knew what I wanted to do, and we ran beautiful programs and I had beautiful people I worked with. One is Jake Langlois and Allison Langlois, who were house parents. Like I said, these young couples. Jake is now the superintendent of Lewiston School systems. But we just got all these young people as mainstreamed as possible. Because what's happening at the end of these kids staying in these programs is they turn 18 years old. They've been highly medicated their entire lives. Adderall, drugs to keep them sedated, calm, they hit 18 years old and they're literally released into the world.

And if you look at the percentage of people walking the streets of Portland, homelessness in Lewiston, if you look at their backgrounds, most of them are kids who grew up in the system and they get released into the world and they have nothing. If you and me became homeless, I'm sure you have sisters or brothers or cousins or friends who would help you. These people have nothing and they get released into the world. So as I'm running these programs, my mind is always thinking about that, what's next. And it's almost the universe saying, your next art is going to be creating a program to help these kids transition out and create lives for themselves. So because the universe loves me, after 10 years of doing that work and cultivating all these beautiful people who could continue my work and what we built there, it was time to move on.

And I went to Port Resources and they offered me the opportunity that I'd been waiting for 15 years, and truly what I thought my whole life was building to. And that was to create a program from scratch that had never been created before. And that was AIM, Achieving Independence in Maine, which was for a brand new up and coming wave that no one even saw, which was high functioning autism. I remember being in a meeting with clinicians and they brought up the word Asperger's for the first time, and no one knew what it was. A year later, we're flooded with autistic young adults. It's really because of the internet and families finding each other and creating a community. And next thing, it was a flood of them at Spurwink. We had so many clients and we're doing so many very physical holds. There was beautiful work being done at Syracuse University at the time about autism, and one of the works was about colors and using colors to soothe.

So the first thing we did at Spurwink was change all the colors of all the houses inside, interior wise, and it dropped therapeutic holds by 20% in the first month. These were just little things we did. So when I got brought over to Port Resources, they were like, listen, we're having a lot of young autistic people. We want to create a program where young people can come in, learn skills and get into the world. At that time Syracuse University is doing beautiful work on this. There's also a wonderful woman named Temple Grandin, who is literally the godmother of autism. And both of them are focusing on the same thing, which is how do we mainstream high functioning autistic people into the community, get them working, get them living. Statistically, kids who go to high school and have good moms and dads, they have autism, they go to school, they get their high school degrees, and then when their friends go off to college or the workforce, they stay home with mom and dad the rest of their lives.

Statistically, if you're home with mom and dad after the age of 25, there's a good chance you're going to live there for a long time. And then there comes a time when you're 45 and your parents are now sixties or seventies and now they're going to the end of their lives, and now what do you do with this 50-year-old person who's never had a chance to live independently? That was the mindset of what I wanted to create. And we created a great team. We had a great therapist named Colin Copeland, who was really, you have to be a ballsy therapist if you're going to try to think outside the box. We had a wonderful state representative named Donnie Carroll from New Gloucester, who was kind of our money man and our PR guy. And then you had me, who created and built the system.

And I remember thinking we weren't going to get anybody. Now our list, we have a three year waiting list at that program. Now we've gotten young people living all over the city, living independent lives. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to see someone come in scared, leaving the nest. They come into this apartment, the six units they share with another roommate, they learn how to bond with other people. They learn these little skills of going to the grocery store, trying to find what their talents in the world are, creating independence, confidence. And then when they're ready, it's a two year program living in the program, but it could be anywhere from two to five, when they're ready to be released, we'll find them apartments, and just like a kid learning how to ride a bike, we're holding that seat until they're ready to let go, and then we let go and they live their lives.

And now we have so many people living in the community, their friends, the community has built. So now we have so many people living, that friends can go over to friends' apartments and hang out. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to see. And part of the program is, I want kids from good households. I want kids who grew up in Spurwink and sweeter. I want everyone to have the opportunity to come and just have a chance at independence. And that doesn't mean that every kid is going to be successful. Some kids aren't ready for that moment. But what we do is give opportunities and chances. And like I said, we've been building it for 15 years, and it really was a culmination. 15 years prior, everything, working with those homeless kids, working how to work as a team, working how to build those residential homes, working on how to inspire young people to get out into the world. Everything was built. The universe set everything up for me. So when I had this moment, we could just build it. It's been beautiful. It's been really, really beautiful. So I'm sorry I've been rambling a lot. I don't even know about the time here, so I apologize.

Lisa Belisle: We are just about at the end of the time.

Billy Jack Goodwin: Oh Lord Almighty, I apologize. I started rambling there.

Lisa Belisle: Not a problem at all, not a problem at all. But I did want people to also know that you have this background as not only an artist, but also as a comic. You're also a certified yoga instructor.

Billy Jack Goodwin: Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: I mean, you have this very varied background, and I guess I'm wondering if part of what your life has been, in 2018 you were named the Central Maine Comic of the Year, and you're also the 2017 Longfellow Maine Comedy Festival. So this idea that you're witnessing all these very tragic things and you keep, day after day after day, stepping into this very significant reality that involves trauma for many, but you're bringing with you the tools that keep you strong and this mindset of really uplifting that is important.

Billy Jack Goodwin: My wife helped me with that. Before my wife, everything was about building the programs, it was my single focus. Not that I can't, when I get home from work, I still love to do beautiful things and I love to dance and I love to have a good time with my friends. But as far as art, when my wife came into my life, she helped me compartmentalize. So I can go to work and I can give my full passion to that, and then I can go and come home and I can give my full passion to my wife and our relationship. And that passion's built, I can have time to do my art. Comedy was a wonderful thing. I did it for 10 years, but I'm not an artist who starts working on one piece of art and I'm going to stick to that field the rest of my life.

Comedy was fantastic. I stepped into that world. I like the people in it. I love to tell these stories about my youth. I wasn't a knock-knock or political joke. I just told stories about my youth and my work, love stories. It was much more of a spoken word kind of storytelling. And I love that. And I was separated from other comics because everything I did was positive and about love. If you ever go to a comedy show, it's kind of rough sometimes, but people really connected with it. It's an interesting art. It's nothing that I would want to do forever. It was a perfect time in my late thirties to experience that. But it's an interesting art because it's like a fix. You go up there, it's a lot of buildup. You go on stage and if you kill it, it feels so good. But then there is the downside of it.

So as soon as you get off stage, it's right back to its ups and downs, which I don't tend to. I'm much more, I grew up in the nineties and the early days where you just did art, not to show, but art just to do art. So funny. When I was growing up, people didn't show their art. Now we live in the world where, I feel bad for young artists. Because if you find yourself and you're a good artist and you do something at the beginning stages and then you put it on Instagram or something, and then you don't get the response that you want, then people go, well, maybe this isn't what I want to do. Where what you should do is just not show anybody and continue to work on that skill.

And the more you do, the more you'll master it. I'll tell you just quickly my story about art and how art works in my life in the universe. So because I'm so secure, the universe loves me, that when it tells me things, I just listen to it. So just like most artists, I had a dream one night about a shape. I'm not much of a mathematical person, but I had a dream about a certain shape, and in that shape, it was on top of a coffee table. So I wake up that next morning and I know instinctually that I'm going to build this coffee table. I just know it. I'm just waiting for the universe to give me the tools. So two days later, I'm driving my truck down the road and at the end of the road I see a nasty big old coffee table that's being given away.

So I back the truck up, throw it in the back, bring it to my shed, and I go to Goodwill and I find some old plates. They just happen to have all these cool gold old plates. So I bring it to the house, I buy Mod Podge, whatever you need to make a cool mosaic table. And now my juices are flowing. This is my artistic feeling. I feel it. So I get to my shed and I start to art. I have my music on. I'm playing some Bob Seger. I've got a six pack of Heineken, maybe a joint or something, and I just go to art. And the next hours, I'm doing all these things. And on Main Street, Bob Seger's playing, I'm working on these little projects as I'm building this piece.

And I love that. I love building something and I see it come to fruition as I'm working on it. To me, that is art, that is like, I have something in my mind. I'm using my hands, I'm building it, it's coming together. And now I get to the final part. It's all done. I have everything set in place. All I have to do now is put a nice bar top on it and it's going to be perfect. So I have it all set up, it looks beautiful. I lay that bar top on top, it's like a liquid, and it's just perfect. And I'm sitting back and I'm looking at, this has been two days worth of work. And it's like, oh my God, this is gorgeous. This is going to be absolutely gorgeous. So anyway, it takes 24 hours to set. I go inside and every few hours I'm popping out to check on the piece, all excited about it.

That next morning I wake up, I'm all excited, I put my pants on, I go outside and I open the door and that piece is sitting right there, but there's some kind of gray blob on top of it. I'm like, what is that? And I look, and somehow in the night, a little mouse jumped on that table and went and died right on the middle of this table. So I'm like, oh my God, all this work. So I grab a paint scraper and I'm like, oh, it's got to come off. And his guts are coming out. I'm like, oh my God, my cat comes out, he's getting on the table now. I'm just having a total meltdown. I'm like, oh my God, all this work, it's all ruined. So just having a pity party, I had to throw the whole thing away, just depressed about it.

So as the years go on, I tell this story, and of course as the story goes, I exaggerate a little bit and it gets bigger and bigger, the story about how you work so hard. But sometimes things come along and just mess it all up. So I told the story and people seem to enjoy that story. So when I went to go do comedy, what do I do? I bring that story to the stage, and now I'm winning awards for that story. And now I think, well, what was the art? Was the art the table, was the art the experience and the story that leads to me now telling the story? But I think it's everything. It's everything. It's the thought I had that night about that image. It's the fact that that table came to me. It's the fact that I took time to build that, enjoy the process of it.

It's the story I learned from that mouse climbing on that table and the way his little life ended. And then the fact that I can take that, turn it, and bring it to a stage and bring enjoyment to people as they hear that story. That is art to me. And through all that, I created, I learned, I got to share. And to me, that is art. That is art. And I don't care if it's making that table or if it's building a residential home for children, or if it's hanging out with my wife on a Saturday night, that art is my life, because the universe loves me. That art comes very naturally from me.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I'm not sure if I exactly appreciate the story because I'm still feeling badly for the mouse, however it is a great overall narrative art. So we'll go with that. But I truly appreciate your coming out here.

Billy Jack Goodwin: No problem. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: And talking to me about your really interesting life and your background and how you got to be doing the work that you're doing with Achieving Independence in Maine, Port Place.

Billy Jack Goodwin: Can I hype one thing before we go?

Lisa Belisle: Absolutely.

Billy Jack Goodwin: I have my little card here. So we at Port Resources have been around since 1970. We work with people with disabilities, physical disabilities, developmental disabilities. We were one of the first agencies to take people out of the institutional system, bring them into the residential world, work on mainstreaming, which is very important. And we run a beautiful program with residential houses all over the state, including my program AIM. Another program we run is, once again, if you're going to be in the nonprofit world, the field is always changing. And now we have older people with disabilities who would've passed away in their thirties. But now with medical advancements, people with Down syndrome can live through their sixties or seventies now. So this whole aging population we've never seen before is coming of age, including early Alzheimer's and things such as that with our clients.

So we run a beautiful program called Port Place. It's the day program that runs Monday through Friday. And it's a place where caregivers and other people can get a little bit of relief, where they can bring their clients, bring people. We have elderly clients where the whole program is based on art and they come, they can work on art. It's a beautiful place where you have staff that can listen and take care and work with that specific population. And we're having a fundraiser, an art fundraiser called The Art of Belonging. And this is for the community too. So our clients make art, and if anyone who's listening wants to contribute their art, it's a 50/50 split. If your art is sold, you can bring your paintings to Port Resources. The showing is at the Barridoff Auction House at 312 Gannett Drive in South Portland. And all the profits go to running our program and giving great lives to our clients. So if you're an artist out there and want to contribute some of your work, please look for Port Resources. Or you can look me up at billyjackyoga@gmail.com. And yeah, that's it.

Lisa Belisle: Appreciate your sharing that message. So anybody who's interested in taking part in that wonderful fundraiser, in supporting the community that way, please take the time to look up Billy Jack at the information that he provided. Otherwise, I feel certain that if you come to a Thursday night Portland Art Gallery opening the first Thursday of every month, there's a pretty high percentage that you'll meet Billy Jack there. And you can actually pretty easily start a conversation about his really great work that he's doing in the nonprofit world, including as the program leader with Port Resources Achieving Independence in Maine at Port Place. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, where we celebrate creativity and the human spirit. And we are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. I've been speaking with Billy Jack Goodwin. Such a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you.