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Texan wins Hemingway look-alike
2006-07-23
A Texas commercial real estate developer won Florida's annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike competition, rocking the house at Sloppy Joe's, the writer's favorite Key West drinking hole, with new lyrics to an American country crooner's tune. Chris Storm, 55, president of Sable Realty Inc. in Amarillo, Texas, credited business acumen, his looks and a takeoff on the Johnny Cash song "Folsom Prison Blues" with his win on Saturday. "If I don't win this contest, we're going home in tears" and "Time to tell these other boys this deal's already done," sang Storm, with bushy silver eyebrows, white hair and a Hemingway-like beard. The 26th Hemingway Days Festival, which ended on Sunday with an arm-wrestling contest in Key West at the tip of the Florida Keys, celebrated the July 21 birthday of the Nobel Prize-winner, born 107 years ago. Surrounded by an exhilarated 37-member family, Storm won the annual look-alike contest attired in khaki trousers, brown boots and a hunting vest sporting five large-caliber bullets. He also addressed the crowd in Swahili. A fifth-year contestant, Storm said his favorite Hemingway novel was "The Old Man and The Sea," written in 1952. He described Hemingway as "a very complicated individual." Hemingway was known as a hard-drinking womanizer and war hero who loved outdoor adventure and found virtue in big-game hunting and bullfighting. Other look-alike hopefuls included second-time contestant Vladimir Malikov, 68, a pensioner from Almaty, Kazakhstan, who said through a translator that he sold his car to travel to Key West via Amsterdam, New York, Memphis, Tennessee and Miami. Joining the crowd was Richard Steel Hemingway, 45, a tool maker from Davison, Michigan, who said his mother told him on her deathbed he was Ernest's son and was born five days before the storied U.S. writer committed suicide in 1961. Recent DNA testing with a Hemingway family member "is a private matter," Steel Hemingway told Reuters. In a literary highlight, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition was won by Beth McMurray, 25, a graduate student from San Mateo, California, who netted $1,000 for her story, "Mascot," about a young girl's emotionally adrift parents. Another Hemingway Festival -- a new one -- is due to be held in Bimini, Bahamas, in August.
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