For Whom the Bull Rolls

There was Mac talking with L.E. -- oh, wait a minute. They were just Mac and L.E. wannabes.

Actually, they were among the few hundred PapaWannabes and a few thousand hangers-on in town for Hemingway Days, full of literary stuff, a rolling of the bulls (on wheels; they tried running live veal on Duval for the HemTennial in '99, but this ain't Pamplona), and a bash Saturday night at Sloppy Joe's to anoint the best lookalike.

It's also a massive boost to the rum trade.

Of course Hemingway was 29 when he got here, slim and with a Citizen Kane moustache; the snowbeard contestants often confuse square-jawed with portly, stuck in Old Man and Sea mode, but no matter. A party's a party.

One perennial Have-Not, though he really would like To Have, is Tom Grizzard of Leesburg (he's in the pink shirt above). He makes it into a brass-knobbed bash, renting a big guest house on Southard, hiring a band, silk-screening T-shirts, printing up fans for his fans. . . . But thus is fame fleeting. This handout was in the gutter across from Fausto's (truth be told, a place almost all of us have been one time or another).