You don’t have to be Willard Scott to understand that when you’re walking around the Magic Kingdom in a Mickey Mouse or a Cinderella costume, you get pretty hot and mighty sweaty.
How do I know this? I’m married to The Frankster. Sure, you may know my wife as a mere social worker, but last July 4, she began a new career, donning a monstrous fleece hot-dog-and-bun costume in 100-degree temperatures at the Nathan’s hot dog-eating contest at Coney Island.
When it was over, my beloved processed beef mascot and I went home-and she was so stinky that she actually emancipated me from laundry duty that week.
So if my wife is so repulsed by the thought of her own underwear, imagine how Disney workers feel. As per company policy, sweaty performers are required to hand in their disgusting undergarments-for the record, we’re talking jockstraps and bike shorts, not the boxers, briefs, panties or thongs that actually lay on the skin-to some Disney laundry employee and receive a pair of someone else’s laundered garments to wear on their next shift.
This has made for some discomfort: These hard-working performers literally don’t know where that underwear has been (could it have been Minnie’s? Could it be Pluto’s? Oy, could it have been Winnie the Pooh’s?)
The undergarment exchange has been the rule for Disney’s performers-as opposed to other “cast members” such as fast-food employees or clean-up crew members, who can wash their own undergarments at home. Some performers have complained of contracting (adults may want to cover the eyes of younger children at this point) pubic lice and scabies from sharing undergarments with their fellow employees.
“Things have been passed around,” Gary Steverson, a stilt walker, told the Associated Press. “I know I don’t want to share my tights and I don’t want to share my underwear.”
Who would? I mean, you don’t even have to know what “scabies” are (they’re mites, by the way, and under a microscope, they look like really angry pit bulls) to be appalled. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your pubic lice.
Fortunately, the Teamsters, best-known for representing truck drivers and their spotless underwear, is on this case of corporate exploitation. The union, which represents 6,000 performers at Disney World, made the sweaty underwear a big issue in contract talks with Disney.
I’m happy to report that after two months of negotiations and thousands of pairs of sweaty underwear, Disney and the Teamsters have finally hashed out a deal to allow performers to bring home the undergarments and wash them for themselves.
This was big news all over the world-much to the chagrin of Disney (which, for some reason, wants to protect its image as a provider of wholesome entertainment, not an incubator of pubic lice) and the Teamsters (which, for some reason, doesn’t want to exploit all the attention-which is really disappointing to a journalist).
“This is not about underwear,” said Donna-Lynne Dalton, a spokeswoman for Teamsters Local 385. “This is not about jockstraps. The media has missed the bigger issues.”
But when pressed, Dalton said the “bigger issues” included getting more rehearsal time. (Hey, that’s a big issue! You wouldn’t want some rookie wearing the Captain Hook costume to accidentally maul kids, now would you?) So rather than worry about the nuts and bolts of union negotiating, we in the media did the right thing: focus on the sweat underwear.
The agreement, of course, did not require Disney to admit wrongdoing, or, in this case, wrong-laundering. No, this is corporate America, where giving workers’s scabies means never having to say “I’m sorry.”
“We have a professional laundry facility,” said Disney spokeswoman Rena Callahan. “We built it after consultations with leaders in the laundry industry. But we are willing to make changes if it makes cast members more comfortable.”
I asked Callahan if she could explain to me just what was making “cast members” feel uncomfortable in the first place-an old journalism trick to get her to say the word “scabies” or “thong”-but she demurred behind a wall of Disney Puritanism (or is that Dickensian Victorianism?).
“These performers wear tights and bike shorts under their costumes,” Callahan said, obviously blushing. “The issue is around, uh, those types of, uh, items.”
And, apparently, this type of discomfort-and perhaps even the offspring of the very pubic lice that’s being passed around the Magic Kingdom today-has been the talk of Disney for years.
“There were always stories of workers who didn’t want to wear someone else’s costume,” said David Koenig, author of the indispensable, behind-the-scenes, Disney-probing “Mouse Tales,” “More Mouse Tales,” and the forthcoming “Can I Really Sell Even More Mouse Tales?”
“A performer would say, ‘Oh, I’m not wearing Sally’s costume because she has crabs,” Koenig added. “It was mostly said in jest, but a lot of people were uncomfortable.”
But that’s all in the past. Thanks to the Teamsters, the “Happiest Place on Earth” is not just Disney World, but also the crotches of all 6,000 Disney performers.
