Hemingway Days return
After Hurricane Irma, Papas returning to Hemingway Days in Key West
Key West lookalike contest and festivities are first since Irma.
The Papas are returning, and not a moment too soon.
Every July, scores of whitebearded men in stifling wool sweaters, khakis and safari hats make a pilgrimage to Key West for the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike contest. It’s a jolly crew of grizzled wannabes on Florida’s southernmost Key, competing in arm-wrestling contests and a running of the “bulls,” a street parade where aspiring Ernests schlep down Duval Street astride fake bulls on wheels.
It all culminates in the look-alike contest at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the onetime haunt of the chest-thumping novelist who called Key West home in the 1930s. Contestants are judged by grooming — is the white beard expressive enough? — but, more important, personality. Look-alikes must do anything to curry favor with the judges, who are themselves former look-alike winners: sing, read poetry, shadowbox in fighting trunks. At no point would this fraternal order of hirsute Hemingways ever admit the irony that the real author was never old and bearded in 1930s Key West. He was a young and strapping brunet with a mustache and a clean-shaven chin. But the sea of white beards is what makes it fun. And vital: When the Hemingway Days festival returns to Key West July 17-22, it will be the first one since Hurricane Irma ripped through the Lower Keys last September, leaving millions of dollars of damage in its wake.
From her perch on the third floor of the sunburn-red Custom House in Key West, Hemingway Days organizer Adele Williams has had a bird’s-eye view of the city’s slumping tourism since Irma made landfall.
“There was this perception that Key West was on its knees [after Hurricane Irma],” says Williams, an education director for the Key