Papa Lives! **

A Floridian took home the grand prize at the Hemingway Days Hemingway Look-A-Like Contest over the weekend. The event was held at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, a Key West institution famous for the fact that I was once thrown out bodily into Duval Street by six bouncers.

Also, Ernest Hemingway used to drink there, so there’s that too.

**Funny story: While living in Gainesville during college in 198… well, too long ago, my roommate was a buddy from home who looked like a 5’11″ Ah-nold. I’m told women considered him very attractive. I wouldn’t know, what with being straight and all. Anyway, he was approached at the Florida Bookstore but a man claiming to be the photographer for the “Men of Florida” calendar and asked if he’d like to take some test shots. Might have been the muscle shirt and Daisy Dukes he was wearing. He agreed, and even accepted a ride home from the photog, where I found them engaged in a deep conversation in the guy’s car when I came home from class. I may have the most finely-tuned gaydar on the planet for a straight-guy, and I knew immediately what was happening. My buddy went over that evening to do his shots, after being warned that he was being set up, and returned an hour later VERY angry and VERY embarassed.

He told me it started with some innocuous head shots, then progressed into shirtless shots, then he was asked to get in a sauna and get sweaty. When he came out, the guy started posing him and let his hands wander a bit. Meh.

So, my buddy shoves him and heads for the door, with the photog trying to apologize and convince him to come back. He hopped into his 1964 red Ford Galaxy (the coolest car in Gainesville at the time, IMO), revved the engine, flipped the bird, and shouted at the top of his lungs,

“Papa Lives!”

Yeah, a long way to go for such little payoff, but thanks for reading. Sorry, I can never see or here anything about Hemingway without that story popping into my brain.