Columnist Susan Snyder: A Disney upheaval in brief

Tuesday, June 12, 2001 | 9:18 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Accent. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

Minnie Mouse has scabies?

Maybe it was Cinderella or Snow White.

Vicious rumors must be flying around Disney's Toon Town after reports last week that union representatives have had to negotiate with Disney officials for workers' rights to have clean underwear.

After two months of bickering over the cleanliness of Dumbo's drawers, it seems those who portray the costumed characters at Florida's Walt Disney World theme parks will be allowed to take their undies home and launder them each day.

Right now workers are to leave all parts of their costumes -- skivvies included -- with the property's costume department for laundering.

According to an Associated Press report, workers typically wear jock straps, tights or bike shorts under their costumes. Regular underwear, it seems, have a tendency to take an E-ticket ride around the nether regions and create unsightly bumps or ridges.

Pluto with panty lines would simply ruin the magic for most of us.

Workers left their underthings with the costume department and were promised clean ones each day when their new costumes were issued.

Workers have said, however, that they have been given undies in questionable condition upon arriving at work. Some even described the items as "stained or smelly."

Gives Winnie the Pooh a whole new meaning. Sounds like the Happiest Place on Earth has made a big bibbidi-bobbidi-boo-boo.

"I don't want to share my tights, and I don't want to share my underwear," an Animal Kingdom stilt walker told the Associated Press.

You have to respect a man who's not afraid to stand up for the right to wear clean tights. Shoot, you have to respect a man who can make a living standing up in clean tights.

The stilt walker says he told Disney officials that at least three cases of scabies or pubic lice have been reported among the characters in the past two years. "Things have been passed around," he says.

That'll make a person think twice before shoving a 6-year-old into a bear hug with Baloo. Here, kid, have a photo op and some anti-bacterial hand soap.

Once we get beyond the idea of an employer demanding to wash our underwear, the real questions spin through our minds like Mad Hatter's teacups.

Who hath been fouled?

Sleeping Beauty? Tigger? Old Mickey Mouse himself?

Are unclean underthings truly to blame, or has something more sinister infected the jolly Disney crew?

Is Happy a little too friendly?

Is Mary Poppins dabbling in a bit of "Fantasia 2000" with Bert?

Maybe Bashful isn't.

Maybe Jiminy Cricket doesn't have a conscience.

The place sounds less like an amusement park and more like the nation's capital all the time -- complete with Goofy and dirty laundry.

First we must endure the embarrassment of the president's daughters caught trying to buy adult beverages with fake IDs, and now we face an outbreak of the unthinkable among Disney's unmentionables.

A nation's people can take only so much indignity.

It's enough to make Pinocchio glad he's not a real boy.