OLIVER PEPPER'S PICKLE

In OLIVER PEPPER'S PICKLE we meet Oliver, age thirty-six: WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), prep school teacher, obsessive art historian, and alcoholic. Each afternoon Pepper sits, nipping at his flask, in a cluttered study that he alone finds appealing. This is how life plays out for him: quietly, simply, and drunkenly. This stewed contemplation ends abruptly, however, when his wife reveals an extended cyber-affair and he is fired for drinking on the job.

Crushed by his wife's disloyalty, cramped by his live-in-sister and her new age boyfriend, and then stalked by a curious self-help book that sweeps the country, Pepper is near despair when he meets a sexy but tough public school principal at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Hoping to score a date with her, he agrees to teach a riotous middle-grade class that tests his sobriety and sanity. Just when he is ready to throw in the towel, Pepper finds redemption in two boys at his new school: an abused autistic child with a gift for Impressionist paintings and a troubled pre-teen longing for connection. On the shoulders of these young boys, Oliver Pepper reconciles the traumatic death of his father, restores the love within his family, and discovers a capacity for bringing unadulterated goodness, even beauty, into his world. John C. Picardi earned an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University's playwriting program. His plays, the award-winning The Sweepers and Seven Rabbits on a Pole, both enjoyed extended runs off-Broadway and continue to be performed at several regional theatres throughout the country. In addition to receiving rave reviews in The New York Times, making critics choice in the LA Times in 2008, these works have also been been published by Samuel French and appeared in The Best Plays of 2003 and The Best Stage Scenes of 2005. He was awarded many grants from the Italian American Foundation and he is presently working on another novel.