F E AT U R E
‘TO BECOME A LEGEND YOU HAVE TO REINVENT YOURSELF’
State Rep. Jason Brodeur compares his former House colleague to entertainer Madonna, who became legendary after reinventing herself. Photo: Florida Memory
Dorworth, shown here speaking on the floor during his time in the Florida House. Photo: Colin Hackley
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job to do,” Brodeur said. “Now that he does advocacy for a living, he will tell me something and I know I have to to hear the other side.” Eventually those relationships will go away and all he will have left is his personality to do the job well, notes Caldwell, who is running to be the next Florida Agriculture Commissioner. “The truth is there’s two people that go into lobbying: the first are totally dependent on their relationship (and) get meetings because they know them personally. But once that runs out, then what? That’s when you see people who are able to use their personal relationships to keep relationship. I think Chris is definitely in the second group,” Caldwell said. The Dorworths now have a 5-month-old baby girl named Grace Caroline. With that new parenting role, a newfound commitment to health and fitness was born. “When I was pregnant, he was touching my belly and said he was going to get healthy for Grace. He told her, talking to the belly, that when she came out, the first thing she would see was a healthy Dad or a liar,” Rebekah Dorworth said. Grace was born and there were no liars in the household. In a few months, Dorworth lost 105 pounds and soon became practically unrecognizable when marching through the Tallahassee landscape that knows him so well. “Committing to a dream is not so easy, but he never lost hope,” Rebekah Dorworth said. “We went through some very challenging times together. He lost the election, we went through a lot of financial struggles and personal ones too. But nobody is more positive in those situations than my husband.” After that flameout and comeback, Doworth says not a day that goes by that his wife doesn’t reference that 2012 Election Night and how glad she is that he lost. But his longtime friend Brodeur, perhaps, puts it best. “The point in order is that to become a legend you have to reinvent yourself: it was true for Madonna,” Brodeur explains. “And if you think about it, Madonna was the Material Girl and then went through a phase and turned into the club hit girl.” “Dorworth is now like the club hit girl.”
