Actress Annabelle Gurwitch was fired four years ago for sounding like a "retard", at least to the ears of her boss, Woody Allen. Since then she has produced a play called Fired: Tales of Jobs Gone Bad, a book, Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed, a documentary called (simply) Fired! and a website, www.firedbyannabellegurwitch.com/.

She also has recently joined United Professionals. Having made all the rounds she cares to make as "the fired lady", she is now returning to her Hollywood life, and all the presumed glitter which that entails. Much of her work as "the fired lady" did indeed focus on the experiences of other Hollywood types - mostly comedians, judging from the list at the link below - but she also interviewed "real people" who had been fired, including a chef at the White House, and many factory workers in Lansing, Michigan, where she went in apparent imitation of another glitterati activist, Michael Moore, who made his own pilgrimage to Flint, Michigan in Fahrenheit 911. "The month I was fired something like 160,000 New Yorkers lost their job. Maybe not all by Woody Allen," she says, "but that's a lot of people. It really opened my eyes."

Although, as a "real" person, I am somewhat skeptical of the motivations of a celebrity augmenting her resume with anecdotes of job loss, ultimately my attitude is "The more, the merrier." The more publicity we can bring to this problem from any source, the sooner we can turn private stigma into public indignation.

"The end was only the beginning" from Los Angeles Times