Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Page B

been in a film with a scene shot right at the corner. And why? Because these films are about the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, boats, helicopters, motorcycles—every modern means of transportation. And so where better to film them than the place that three centuries ago was spotted as our country’s leading transportation hub by Hollywood’s favorite unintentional location scout: Louis Joliet.
    In one typical offering, Chain Reaction, Keanu Reeves plays a fugitive motorcycle-riding University of Chicago machinist being framed for murder, treason, and terrorism. Being framed is usually a big part of all these movies. Attempting to elude the police, he’s chased down Michigan Avenue to the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The bridge starts opening, and Keanu scurries up, a cop not far behind. He does a little better than Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci did in the ’20s, but then, Keanu’s a movie star, has a stunt double, and can do retakes. As the angle of the raised bridge gets steeper, the cop slides to the bottom. Keanu’s at the top. What should he do? He looks up—a police helicopter. He looks down—a police boat. He crawls into the bottom of thebridge as it’s lowered and ducks into a garbage truck to safety. When he meets his fellow, shapely fugitive, who nervously awaits him at the train station, the conductor asks, “What took you so long?” To which Keanu deadpans, “The bridge was up.”
    Up, down, north, south—whatever. The point is that the bridge was. Right at the center of attention, in the middle of the action, at the hub. We used to ship grain from this corner. Now that entertainment is America’s second biggest export, the product we ship is Keanu.

Species-on-Species Abuse
    I AM STANDING ON D ISNEY World’s Main Street, U.S.A., watching Cinderella go by. I am watching, but the three-year-old next to me plays with a knob on his stroller. His grandparents, or at least I assume they’re his grandparents, are sweating and waving their arms and wearing panicked smiles trying to get his attention, pointing at Cinderella and then the Little Mermaid, yelling, Look! Look!, their eyes full of melting dollar signs, wondering why oh why they came all this way and shelled out so many Disney Dollars to fly here and stay here and be here just so the little fellow could obsess over a plastic bump—a beige plastic bump—on his goddamn stroller. After a few minutes, Grandma gives up and, I’m pretty sure, vows to amend her will.
    Me, I’m with the kid on this. So is my friend David, who, as Cinderella’s procession passes, tells me, “Look at all the communications majors!” There is better stuff to stare at in the Magic Kingdom thancoeds dressed up like cartoon characters. The sadly underrated lifesize animatronic Lyndon Johnson, for example.
    David and I came to Disney World for the same reasons everyone comes to Disney World: to reaffirm our faith in the U.S. Constitution, contemplate the profound influence of the American presidency on our lives, and revisit the literary legacy of Mark Twain. Well, that’s not true. We came to Disney World because we had nonrefundable plane tickets to Orlando to see a NASA shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center and when that got scrubbed, we figured, what the hell, Disney.
    Neither of us has ever been to a Disney anything before, except of course for the movies. I lived in Oklahoma as a child. My family never went to Disney World or Disneyland for the same reason we never went to either coast. My parents’ U.S.A. is a triangle of the continent fenced in between Butte, Santa Fe, and Little Rock. So my childhood theme park was Dogpatch, a hillbilly wonderland in Arkansas with banjo players, faux run-down shacks, and ample goat-petting opportunities. There are a lot of pictures of my sister and me with our arms around cartoonish mountain folk with corncob pipes clenched