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One recent evening at a Walt Disney World resort called Caribbean Beach, the tikki bar was entirely empty. The only customer turned out to be an off-duty bartender. Like all other Disney World employees, bartenders here are officially called “cast members.” This particular cast member talked shop and flirted a little too loudly. He and his attractive on-duty colleague discussed how to locate the surveillance cameras (they’re hidden in the bookshelf speakers) and how to give away unauthorized freebies (zip the keycard and void the transaction).

It’s peak season at Disney World–that’s the one in Florida, not California–and 51,000 Disney employees are celebrating the centenary of Walt Disney’s birth. It’s not clear how many tourists are celebrating with them at Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and the handful of other Disney theme parks here in Orlando. Judging from the short lines and vacant seats at Space Mountain, attendance is down. Way down.

Many guests have the misimpression that Disney World itself is 100 years old. It isn’t. A cast member in a blue jumper tells me that Walt Disney himself personally cut the ribbons here in 1952. But I instinctually distrust everything at Disney World, especially the histories.

It’s true that security is a little tighter since September. Friendly security guards rifle through backpacks, purses, and fanny packs at the entrances to every park. But one senses there are too many Disney targets in too many Disney places, tucked into too many acres of Florida swampland, to attract a serious terrorist plot. Cinderella’s castle, which is essentially a 600-foot façade on a cramped one-room gift shop, somehow doesn’t seem like much of a prize in the global war on terrorism.

On the other hand, Disney’s two new cruise ships are sitting ducks. At nearby Port Canaveral, security is waterproof and vacancies are rare. Since launching their luxury Carribean cruise business in 1999, Disney Cruise Lines has been a resounding success. Scores of sun-starved Midwesterners like me buy all-inclusive packages that admit us to the theme parks, then we climb aboard the Disney Magic or the Disney Wonder for a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. Each time we make port, we are required to bring our keycards and photo IDs, and our bags are X-rayed. A bomb-sniffing dog wags its tail.

One port-of-call is Castaway Cay, a 1,000 acre Caribbean island which Disney purchased a few years ago. Formerly known as Gorda Cay, it was an uninhabited drug smugglers’ stopover with an airstrip and not much else. Disney dredged a deep-water harbor for their ships, which weigh anchor here twice a week. At each anchorage, about 2,500 slightly overweight professionals from Minneapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis are disgorged, steering their children to Disney’s exclusive beach, playground, and restaurant.

On the paved trail to this island paradise, Disney has also built a rustic two-room shack that serves as Castaway Cay’s official post office, a bureau operated by the Bahamas Postal Service. Here, you can buy real Bahamian stamps that feature a beautiful image of the cruise ship from which you just disembarked. The Postmistress, Miss Carmita Roker, says there are 40 permanent residents of the island. How many of these are Disney cast members? All of them, she says. “Except me. But I don’t live here.”

Minneapolis and St. Paul are self-confident enough, thank heavens, to recognize that the Windy City has some things to recommend it. Chief among them, the Chicago style hot dog, one of this magazine’s life forces. In recent years, there have been just two vendors in the Twin Cities from whom a hungry fellow can reliably purchase this toothsome delight.

First things first: Understand that a Chicago dog bears little resemblance to your usual ballpark frank. There are a number of highly refined and specific ingredients–a recipe and alchemy that must strictly be observed. First, of course, the dog itself. It must be a Vienna Beef hot dog, with natural skin casing, the kind of high-quality wiener that provides the “snap” which repels the uninitiated and simpleminded. Then there are the toppings. Sport peppers, tomatoes, relish, onion, and yellow mustard. Pickle spear. Celery salt.

Jerry Petermeier, former owner of grubby West Bank institution The Wienery, says the sine qua non of an authentic Chicago dog is the poppy seed bun. It may seem a trifle, but poppy seed buns are actually available from only one local distributor. And without the poppy seeds, in the common vernacular, you got squat.

The other day, Pat Starr was trying to pass off non-poppy seed buns. The Weinery’s current operator is a sturdy and smiling man of thirty-something who takes orders from behind the grill, and shouts greetings to the constant stream of regulars coming in the derelict door. He wears a stocking cap in all weather. “This isn’t really a Chicago dog,” he said apologetically. “But I ran out of buns.”

The next day, Tommy Dennis tut-tutted in mock disapproval. He and his brother Bobby run Joey D’s in South Minneapolis, a “Chicago style eatery” which native Chicagoans treat as a local consulate. Wearing a Blackhawks away jersey over his barrel-shaped chest, Tommy said there’s no single ingredient that makes a Chicago Dog authentic, because “you gotta have it all.”
And it’s all gotta come from Chicago. Pat Starr gets his stuff–the celery salt, the day-glo Chipico relish–from a local distributor that specializes in Windy City fare. But the Dennis brothers rent their own semi and drive it down to Chicago every couple of months. “This is the real deal,” said Bobby Dennis, with a photo of Mike Ditka peeking in agreement over one shoulder, and Stan Makita peeking over the other.

The other day, we noticed the streetlights on the Lake Street-Marshall Avenue bridge were lit during daylight hours. But just on the Minneapolis side. The Twin Cities appear to share responsibility for the bridge. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul cops cruise the span, and the electric company has the bridge’s faux-Victorian lamps on two separate circuits. Minneapolis seems to be less shy about running up their half of the bill.

This accident of circuitry calls attention to the bridge’s symbolism as a passage between light and dark, life and death. Just a few months ago, a St. Paul boy fell from the girders beneath the overpass. A youthful romantic like many before him, he died trying to spray paint the name of his beloved on the undergirding.

Then there are the suicides. Bridge jumping’s surely not the most popular way to go, but it’s a provocative one. Unlike running your car in the garage, or knocking back a bunch of sleeping pills in your own bedroom, the jump is desperately anonymous. Many bridge suicides go unidentified for weeks.

Every six months, someone jumps off a bridge somewhere in the Twin Cities. It’s most common where high stress, lofty overpasses, and youthful angst converge–at the University. Washington Avenue bridge, towering a hundred feet over the Mississippi, is the site of at least one jump each year. Here, 25 years ago, Pulitzer poet John Berryman hurdled into eternity. It’s fitting and ironic that another poet, John Ashbery, is excerpted on another of the area’s most celebrated bridges– the Armajani footbridge at the Walker.

The Golden Gate bridge is the site of 30 suicides per year, prompting the city of San Francisco to install telephones on the bridge with direct connections to a suicide hotline. There’s no plan to do the same here, since relatively few people do it. Still, they may not be jumping from bridges, but in Minnesota suicides out number homicides 3 to 1.

A Minneapolis water truck is parked among pylons on the Lake Street-Marshall Avenue bridge. Roy, a Minneapolis city worker spraying down the bridge deck, doesn’t know what the deal is with the lights. He just shrugs. “Must be the full moon,” he says. “C’ est la vie.”

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, think of The Rake as a work zone. Slow down, give us a brake. We aim to fill the potholes, maybe add another lane. If it’s all going to a hot place in a hurry, we want to make the ride as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

This is a rich town. There aren’t all that many American cities that still support two daily newspapers, two city magazines, and two alternative weeklies. Media as a topic of media, of course, bores us all to tears. Bear with us a moment, though. Like pro sports teams, art museums, light rail, and an openly bald governor, a vibrant local media is one of the things that helps us believe we matter, helps us believe the Twin Cities are something more than the last stop before Seattle.

Just so, this town may not need another magazine, any more than it needs thousands of square feet of new development right outside our door in downtown Minneapolis. Indeed, recent numbers suggest that vacancy rates in the metro area are the highest they’ve been in five years. Nevertheless, the building boom continues. We guess we’ll take our cues from the developers: We aim to be the biggest and the best, and the vacancy rate will become someone else’s problem, yeah? Perhaps it’s the patriotic thing to do.

Seriously, though. Magazines like all other enterprises need an excuse for conducting business. We felt that most of the worthy publications already in print here were for somebody else. Edina housewives, in particular, seem to be a well-served readership. And a handful of Gen-Xers who somehow are still stuck in the bar scene without serious jobs or families still have their Lovelines and refugee-of-the-week stories. But the rest of us–folks who live, work, and play in the city, folks who have a passion for life that goes beyond the area’s terrific crème brulee and cosmetic surgeons, folks whose politics have never been as predictable as the newspapers–we don’t have a periodical to read and enjoy. It’s not a commonly known fact to the general public, but there’s nothing in the International Code of Print Media that says reading and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive–it just happened that way.

Our hope is to rake up some intelligent and entertaining stories for ourselves and for you. Our intentions are good, and the road is smooth, and who cares where it goes, anyway? It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, right?

On Nine One One, while the whole of America was in fear and shock from those true believers diving our own commercial airlines into our skyscrapers, Larry Kegan was unable to get his tracheotomy suctioned and he couldn’t breathe. The lack of oxygen caused him to have a heart attack and he was gone before Jose came out of the Seven-Eleven with the batteries. Not one television reporter noticed that September 11 was the day Kegan returned to his God.

If he could have stood up he would have been six feet tall, and he wasn’t any wider than a beer truck. It always looked like the wheelchair had two flat tires and he was riding on the rims because of all that weight. Larry hated being overweight, and was not heavy until late in life when his organs went more and more haywire and they had to keep adding machines to keep him alive. He never saw anything wrong with himself, just some bad luck as a teenager, and a broken body. He used to say, “If I was on my feet I would never be fat.” So his friends became extensions of his arms and legs and tried to stay out of the way.

Larry Kegan the musician never brought up his Dylan connection except if you knew. Sometimes he’d mention Bob with a grin. He’d always put an emphatic spin on Bob. He’d open his eyes real wide, look dead at you, slowly shake his head, and smile like that cat outta Alice in Wonderland. The tone of his voice and smile said he was telling some kind of secret, important, inside joke. I never saw anyone put so much English on a name.

Larry knew he was mortal and that quads don’t tend to live as long. He would always say, “If I can just make it one more year…” That was his mantra. “One more year.”

Geno LaFond wrote songs and played guitar with him. They toured off and on for 15 years. “I would fly out and meet up with them, hang for a few days and then fly home,” Geno says. “Larry would go for weeks sometimes, and different people would meet up with him and help him. First time I traveled on tour was 1975. The Rolling Thunder Tour. Incredible!” Kegan and LaFond called themselves The Mere Mortals. They came up with the name when Geno first met Bob. “Larry and I laughed that even Bob was mortal. Although maybe we were a bit more so.” When The Mere Mortals played, Kegan avoided saying Bob’s name. Instead he’d say, “Here’s a song by a friend of mine.”

On the wall over Larry’s bed there were snapshots: Bob, Kegan, and Louis Kemp at 13 and again at 50, three boyhood buddies who kept in contact their whole lives. Below that was a snapshot of Kegan and Muddy Waters. Leaning on the top of the dresser there was The Bridge Concert poster featuring Neil Young, Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, Cheech Marin, and The Mere Mortals. (Neil Young throws The Bridge Concert every year to raise money for the school his two disabled kids attend.) Over the years, The Mere Mortals had played front act for Bob, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and a who’s who of some of the biggest names in music. Kegan was always in the middle of things with Scarlet Rivera, Kinky Friedman, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Danko, Jackson Browne, and local blues and folkie players such as Willie Murphy, Paul Metsa, and Larry Long. It’s like the old joke where the Pope comes out with Kegan at St. Peter’s Square, huge crowds cheering. Somebody pulls your coat and asks, “Who’s the guy with Larry Kegan?”

Larry was a hip and talented guy, but only a mere mortal, with all the failings that come with the territory. Take this, for example: Larry was a high quad, so he had to get someone to brush his teeth, feed him, wipe his ass, or it didn’t get done. Let’s say it nicely: Larry was skillful at “motivating” people. He was among the best at playing the players because that’s how he got his nose scratched.

Kegan and Marty Keller were trying to market a film script, written from their unpublished book, Some Get The ’Chair: A Memoir of Sex, Disability and Rock ’n’ Roll. Knowing Kegan, Marty did most of the work. (“Some Get The ’Chair” is also a song by Kegan and LaFond.) It covers the sex resort Kegan started in Mexico for disabled Vietnam Vets—an achievement commemorated by the Willem Defoe character in Born on The Fourth of July. It covers the SAR, the sexual attitude reassessment program for disability now required at medical schools across the country, which was founded by Kegan with Dr. Ted Cole. It covers Kegan and Dylan as kids.

Last fall at Easy Creek was one of his best shows, but things were changing. Kegan and Geno were not tied to each other as they had been for years. Kegan always took the spotlight, but Geno wanted more recognition and Kegan resented that. Kegan’s living situation changed a few years ago when he and his significant other, Carol, bought a house together. He was not as “accessible” to his pals. She gave him something to live for and encouraged him to take better care of himself. He focused on Carol. He stopped saying “One more year,” stopped taking so many risks.

There was strain between Geno and Kegan, but it never erupted. I’d hear nasty behind-the-back comments from Kegan. About 3 one morning after he died, I got a call from Carol, saying it had been about a song. Kegan had tried to finish writing “Just Because of Your Kiss” with Geno and Tom Greenwald, but here the stories diverge. He did finish it with Dennis Morgan, a Nashville songwriter originally from Sleepy Eye (“Sleepin’ Single in a Double Bed”). To me, it looked like Dennis, a songwriter with a wall full of gold records, finished it. Larry finally agreed that Geno and Tom had a part of the song, and it ended up that Dennis got half ownership while Larry, Tom, and Geno split the other half. That incident put a strain on Geno and Larry’s 30-year friendship. The fact that Larry loved a woman and shared a house with her—pushing 60, he was starting to settle down—and that Geno wanted more recognition meant they needed to renegotiate their relationship. What would have happened is anybody’s guess because Larry died first.