Getting Fired, Finding Freedom: Susan Jeremy’s One-Woman Triumph

By the time Susan Jeremy was shown the door for the first time, she was only 16 years old. The job was Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, the manager was named Robert, and the sting of rejection landed hard. “I never forgot it,” Jeremy says. “It was my first job other than babysitting, and I was at such a vulnerable age.” That moment—recreated onstage in her acclaimed one-woman show Robert Will Show You the Door (Tales of Being Fired)—became an early rehearsal for a life steeped in rejection, reinvention, and, ultimately, resilience.

Premiering in Puerto Vallarta on February 27, Jeremy’s show is a hilarious and unexpectedly heartfelt memoir that transforms decades of lost jobs, odd gigs, and career zigzags into a riveting evening of theater. At once laugh-out-loud funny and deeply humane, Robert Will Show You the Door reframes getting fired not as failure, but as fuel—a creative accelerant that propelled Jeremy toward her true calling.

“I feel like that first firing made me ready for a life of rejection in show business,” she says. And show business, in all its unpredictability, has been the throughline of her life—even when it wasn’t paying the bills.

A Career Built on Detours, Not Dead Ends

Jeremy’s résumé reads like a sampler platter of American labor: babysitter, fast-food worker, bakery counter attendant, Radio City Music Hall employee, kids’ party clown, roller-skating cigarette promoter, stand-up comic, and eventually, New York City public school teacher, including work in a psychiatric ward. In the hands of a lesser performer, such a list might feel scattered. On Jeremy’s stage, it becomes a cohesive coming-of-age story spanning childhood to the present, grounded in the universal tension between passion and practicality.

“Because I always knew I was an artist, I viewed every job as a waiting period until I would make it in show business,” she explains. That belief—she readily admits—was “delusional thinking,” but it was also a survival mechanism. It allowed her to endure miserable jobs, like working as a receptionist in a law firm, while quietly sharpening her observational skills. At the same time, those detours revealed talents she hadn’t anticipated. “It also made me realize that I had abilities—like teaching—outside of show business.”

Turning Firings Into Fuel

The show’s title, both ominous and hilarious, comes directly from Jeremy’s teenage trauma. “Robert was my manager at my first ever real job,” she says. “He showed me the door after only three weeks. I was devastated.” Decades later, “Robert” has become a symbolic figure—standing in for every boss, institution, and gatekeeper that decided she didn’t fit. By naming him, embodying him, and ultimately laughing at him, Jeremy reclaims the power of that moment.

One of the show’s most dazzling elements is Jeremy’s ability to populate the stage with a full cast of characters using almost no props. With an encyclopedic arsenal of accents, precise physicality, and impeccable timing, she portrays 15 distinct people—from parents and bosses to coworkers and students—often shifting between them in seconds. A bare stage becomes a kaleidoscope of workplaces, decades, and social worlds.

“I’ve always been a mimic,” Jeremy says. “As far back as age seven, I was imitating Lily Tomlin’s characters from TV.” By ten, she had memorized entire comedy albums by Richard Pryor and George Carlin. She studied mime, learning how people walk, sit, dance, laugh. Later, as a clown at kids’ parties, moving funny was a necessity. Even at home, comedy was a shared language. “My sister and I would practice different voices just to make each other laugh.”

That lifelong physical intelligence shines brightest in sections like her nostalgic detour to Studio 54, where disco-era dating tales meet pure movement comedy. “I can dance!” she says, plainly—and her characters can too. One character, she notes, “walks like he’s dancing and ends in a pose.” The audience doesn’t just hear about these moments; they see and feel them, embodied with joyful specificity.

Working in the Closet: Comedy, Gender, and Survival

Beneath the humor, the show grapples with identity—particularly the intersection of work, sexuality, and survival. Jeremy’s realization later in life that she wasn’t straight unfolds alongside her professional journey, revealing how deeply the two were intertwined. “Work was onstage as a stand-up,” she says. “Gay was not accepted the way it is today.” The comedy world she came up in was dominated by men, with few women comics getting booked. Being openly queer was a risk she couldn’t afford.

“I had to play the game,” she says. That meant presenting as straight—keeping her hair long, wearing red lipstick, flirting with club owners to secure stage time. “I had to work in the closet in order to be considered for comedy club bookings and auditions for television shows.” Those compromises, now examined through the lens of time and humor, add emotional depth to the show and resonate with anyone who has ever edited themselves to survive professionally.

The Classroom as Creative Grounding

If comedy gave Jeremy a voice, teaching gave her something equally vital: stability. After years of chasing gigs, she found herself in New York City public schools, where she stayed for 24 years. Teaching provided a regular paycheck, a sense of worth, and the feeling that she was making a real difference. It also offered structure, purpose, and—paradoxically—creative freedom.

“It helped my performance because I learned to produce my own work around the teaching schedule,” she explains. There was no time for procrastination. Summers became sacred performance seasons, during which she produced her shows in three or four cities every year. Occasionally, the worlds collided. “I even called in sick from teaching for a week to perform in Dublin,” she admits, laughing.

Her stories from the classroom—especially working in a psychiatric ward—are among the show’s most powerful moments. By turns absurd and deeply humane, they reflect an educator trying to do meaningful good under pressure. Audiences, particularly teachers, respond viscerally to these sections, recognizing the exhaustion, the joy, and the quiet heroism embedded in the work.

Freedom, Finally

Now retired from teaching, Jeremy is experiencing what she describes with unmistakable glee. “Freedom, baby!” she says. “I never stopped performing, but now I feel like an unleashed dog in the dog park.” The creative output is flowing freely: a new show just completed, a book half written, and ideas multiplying without the constraints of a school calendar.

Taking Robert Will Show You the Door on tour feels less like closure than propulsion—a full-circle moment that validates every false start and firing along the way. By reframing rejection as redirection, Jeremy offers audiences something rare: permission to see their own detours as meaningful.

Robert Will Show You the Door (Tales of Being Fired) will be presented for four performances in Puerto Vallarta: Friday, February 27 and Saturday, February 28, and again on Friday, March 6 and Saturday, March 7, at ART VallARTa, located at Pilitas 213 in Amapas. Tickets are 450 MXN, and seating is limited. Hilarious, heartfelt, and brimming with humanity, Susan Jeremy’s one-woman tour de force is a must-see for fans of solo performance, great storytelling, and anyone who has ever tried—and failed—to find God’s plan on the first try.