About
Gary Scarpa is a lifelong resident of Shelton, Connecticut. He enjoyed a lengthy and fulfilling career as an English teacher and a guidance counselor at Shelton High School. Along with his wife, Francesca, he devoted himself to theater for forty-three years. Gary and Francesca directed the Shelton High School Drama Club for more than thirty years, and they founded the Youth CONNection Players in 1983 and Center Stage Theatre in 2005.
Gary has been recognized by Long Wharf Theatre as Outstanding Theatre Educator as well as by the Shelton Jaycees who named him Educator of the Year in 1989. As a couple, the Scarpas have been honored by numerous organizations, most notably receiving the Silver Seal Award from the Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Raymond P. Lavietes Service to Youth Award from the Boys and Girls Club of the Lower Naugatuck Valley. In 2017, Gary and Francesca were honored as inaugural inductees into the Shelton High School Hall of Fame.
After his retirement from both education and theater, Gary reinvented himself and began writing fiction.
What are the Chances? -- Gary’s second novel, is a historical romance set during the Great Depression and World War II. His third novel, Still Life, is on schedule to be published later in the summer of 2024.
Featured Work
What are the Chances?
The time is nine months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The setting is a pair of small factory towns, divided by a river and nestled in a valley in America. The characters are a boy and a girl, struggling to carve out their place in the world. Michael DeMarco is twenty years old and full of hopes and dreams. Cecelia Alberino, beginning her senior year of high school, is beautiful and talented. As first generation Italian-Americans, they realize they have incredibly similar families. Both dream of breaking through the dull routine of their lives, setting themselves free of their humble family backgrounds, and doing something remarkable. When fate brings them together again and again, the two share their challenges and their love, but from afar since Michael has enlisted and is training to fight in World War II.
In this captivating novel, the reader is transported to the turbulent wartime era and also given glimpses of the Great Depression as experienced by two young people growing up and coming of age during these historic back-to-back eras. What are the Chances? – dramatic, comical, and heartbreaking – is a story of what it meant to grow up as the children of immigrants during the 1930s and 1940s. It is a story of the complexity of dreams and the overcoming of obstacles. It is a story of love, of perseverance, and of destiny.
