You're Fired!

“Hey, I’m Jack Evans. I used to be somebody, but now I’m here and I’m the DJ for the night,” joked former Councilmember Jack Evans at a book launch for Beth Solomon’s From Fired to Fabulous. “I won’t be spinning records later, but I’m very happy to be here and welcome all of you to Martins. I wanted to talk a little bit about how I know Beth and some of the ups and downs that we’ve all had. I first met Beth when she was outside my house, picketing my house. True story. We were planning to build a new convention center and she and her group didn’t want the convention center and I was supporting it on the council. And so they came to my house and picketed. My children were very young at the time, and I remember my daughter saying, dad, there’s a parade outside.”

“I didn’t think there would be a parade. And indeed it wasn’t. It was Beth. So time goes on, Convention Center got built.  I got a call one day from her and she said, ‘I’d like to get together with you for lunch.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, this is the person for whom I was the devil incarnate and she’s calling me up for lunch.  Apparently, she was in a class where the project was to call up the person you liked the least and take them out for lunch and see if you could establish a camaraderie. So I was the Guinea pig and we went out to lunch together.”

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“We spent a lot of time working on projects together, being supportive of each other as times went on. And what Beth has done is written a book that talks about people who have ups and downs, which is all of us. There are times when you’re on top of the world and there are times when you’re at the bottom of the mountain and nobody can speak better  to that than I can. I’ve seen the tops and I’ve seen the bottoms. And her book is more about what do you do when it happens to you. What do you do when you get fired, so to speak. And how you cope with that and how you come back from it. And I think you have to read this because it’s excellent. Beth has been fired a lot.”

Read more here.