How Love Found Picasso

Book excerpt: Picasso is a starving artist from Italy whose name, along with not being the actual Picasso limits his success to the point of feeling defeated. He is truly talented though. What compounds feeling defeated is that Picasso also starves for love just as much as success. Friends of Picasso believe in his talent though, surprising him on his birthday with plane tickets and entry fee to the "New Artist Expo" in Chicago. While in Chicago, Picasso finds an abysmal string of bad luck by doing awful at the New Artist Expo, along with losing his passport and airline tickets back home, but most importantly missing several opportunities to meet the most beautiful woman he has ever laid eyes on. With a small beam of redemption, Picasso's friends find him a way back home to Italy by way of a cargo ship leaving from New York in just a few days. Using his art and the sorrow of a missed opportunity to find love as a catalyst, Picasso bows out of Chicago on an adventure to New York just in time to catch the cargo ship back home. Little does he know that Love is on the way to find Him! Love is a recovered hippy with beauty and kindness bursting from the seams. She is also a high-level executive who has traded the hope of finding true love for her career in Chicago. With the prompting of her friends, she decides to go back to her roots. For only one day she decides to wear a beautiful flower dress that deep down inside her heart hopes to draw the attention of a man and fall truly in love. Unknowingly she is spotted by Picasso on several occasions over the course of the day, but sadly they never officially meet due to tragic yet hilarious circumstances. Love gives up on love once again. Until the very next day when she is walking home from church and spots a painting leaning up against a flower stand with her in it wearing the very same dress she was wearing just the day before! Instantly, Love believes that love lies behind the artist of the painting! Details on the whereabouts of the artist are given to Love from the florist who "bought the painting from some poor sap trying to get to New York who hopped a bus to Sandusky, Ohio earlier today." Thus begins the adventure of "How Love Found Picasso!"