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The Fun Also Rises
Roots in Pamplona
Like all great ideas, said McDonnell's friend Michael Howard, this one started over a couple of beers.
"Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. . . . Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls galloping, tossing their heads up and down."
  The crowd at last year's Running of the Bull. "People like to goof around at the beach," a founder of the event says. "It's stupidity for stupidity's sake." (Courtesy Michael Mcdonnell)
VIDEO | Dewey Beach residents, tourists and two humans in a bull costume charge along the beach during the annual "running of the bull," in this footage from 2005.
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Ernest Hemingway
"The Sun Also Rises"
McDonnell had read it a few too many times, he said. Then one year while finishing law school, he ended up with plane tickets to Spain for a wedding -- long story. Anyway, he talked Howard into going to Pamplona's Festival of San Fermin instead, and there they were, watching the running of the bulls.
And then watching two angry bulls turn around and thunder back at them.
It seemed like the Spaniards knew what to do, and only the two Americans were scrambling for cover, hopping a fence as the bulls raced by. They laughed about what idiots they were -- until the bulls came back about a minute later. Just as the Spaniards had anticipated.
"We didn't so much run with the bulls as hide from the bulls," said Howard, now a real estate agent in Rockville.
And: "We were screaming like little girls."
When they came home, they wanted to recreate the Carnaval -meets-Mardi Gras feel of Pamplona, so they planned a beach party with paella and sangria, and someone -- probably Andrew Brady, now a Securities and Exchange Commission attorney from Bethesda -- said they needed a bull, too.
"If Hemingway was right . . . and you should 'always do sober what you said you'd do drunk,' " McDonnell wrote on their beach house Web site, "then doesn't it also follow that you should always do drunk what you swore you'd never do sober?"
The Madness Spreads
It wasn't all that weird for Dewey.
