Annual Hemingway Look-Alike Contest begins in Florida Keys

KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) — The annual Hemingway Look-Alike Contest started in Key West Thursday, marking the 123rd anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s July 21 beginning.

This yr’s competitors attracted 135 portly, bearded males, who’re endeavoring to show their likeness to the famed American creator. The competition is a spotlight of Key West’s annual Hemingway Days festivities, staged to have fun the artistic expertise and colourful life-style of the person who lived and wrote on the island for many of the Nineteen Thirties.

Thursday night time’s entrants paraded throughout the stage at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the place Hemingway and his cohorts usually met for drinks, earlier than a judging panel of former contest winners.

Most had full beards and wore sportsman’s apparel, seemingly emulating the “Papa” persona adopted by Hemingway in his later years.

On Thursday morning, a bunch of look-alikes helped launch a 185-pound (83-kilogram) rehabilitated loggerhead sea turtle, coincidentally dubbed “Papa” when it was rescued after being entangled in fishing line, off the Florida Keys’ Sombrero Seaside in Marathon.

The look-alike contest’s second preliminary spherical is ready for Friday, and the 2022 winner is ready to be chosen Saturday night time.

Late Wednesday, Nick Henke of St. Louis, Missouri, was named the winner of the Lorian Hemingway Brief Story Competitors. His entry, “A Lot of Carrefours,” triumphed over 775 different American and worldwide submissions, judged by Ernest Hemingway’s creator granddaughter.

Hemingway Days continues by Sunday with occasions together with an offbeat “Working of the Bulls” spoof and the Key West Marlin Event.

Whereas dwelling in Key West throughout many of the Nineteen Thirties, Hemingway wrote classics together with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “To Have and Have Not.”