tournament begins May 8

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – The Eastern Florida State College softball team clinched a spot in the FCSAA Division I/NJCAA South Atlantic District Championships with a win on Saturday.

The Titans, who finished the regular season 22-22 in the Citrus Conference, defeated the State College of Florida Manatee 6-3 in the first game and then lost the second game 5-2 on the road.

Eastern Florida State College will compete in the tournament beginning May 8 at the Eddie C. Moore Complex in Clearwater. It will be the first time the Titans will be in the tournament since 2019.

In Game 1, the Titans scored in the third inning as Brooke Theisen doubled, bringing home Marisa Shoudt. SCF-Manatee would tie the game in the fourth inning. But in the fifth inning, the Titans would score twice and then three more times in the seventh inning to pick up the win.

Hannah Strickland would pick up the win, her 16th of the season and Alanna O’Brien came in to pick up the save, her seventh of the season.

Theisen had two hits in the games for the Titans and Shoudt and Livie Davis each scored twice.

In Game 2, the Titans scored runs in the second and third innings, but SCF-Manatee would tie the game in the bottom of the third and take the lead with three runs in the fourth inning.

Destiny Lake came in and tossed two scoreless innings of relief for the Titans, striking out one.

Eastern Florida State College now has 37 wins on the season which ties the 2011 team with the most wins in the past 30 years. They will wait to see who they will face in the first round of the state tournament.

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Florida (WSVN) — A popular South Florida river cruise is being sued after two women say they were drugged on board. 7’s Heather Walker investigates.

Jungle Queen Riverboats is advertised as “fun for the whole family.”

The cruise includes a tropical island dinner, show and sightseeing in Fort Lauderdale.

Karren Hanson, suing tour boat: “We were there for some, you know, R&R, just to get away and enjoy some, you know, some girl time.”

But they say their girls trip took a turn shortly after they boarded the boat.

Heather Walker: “When did you realize something was wrong?”

Teresa Viscovich, suing tour boat: “Within 15 minutes.”

Longtime friends Teresa and Karren were expecting to have a good time, but after one glass of wine, they say things became foggy.

Teresa Viscovich: “My speech was slurred. I couldn’t walk right.”

They were confused, but one thing was clear.

Teresa Viscovich: “Something is very wrong.”

The next day, they called police.

According to the police report, the women “were concerned that their bartender … drugged their drinks.”

He was texting the women trying to meet up with them after the cruise.

Teresa Viscovich: “The way the bar is set up is, you can’t see anything he’s doing back there.”

Police investigated but found “no video on the cruise and no evidence of who, if anyone, had put anything in their drinks,” and the case was closed, despite the fact that the women had their hair tested, and the results showed they were positive for GHB, which the Drug Enforcement Administration says is known as a date rape drug.

Teresa Viscovich: “I’ve never done drugs a day in my life.”

The women are now suing Jungle Queens Inc. for failing to prevent drugging on a boat.

We went to the Jungle Queen to get a response.

A lawyer for the boat company sent a statement saying in part:

“Jungle Queens has taken the allegations … very seriously. Jungle Queens has worked hard at building a reputation … and the safety of their guests are of the greatest importance. We have conducted a thorough investigation and have concluded there is no evidence to support these baseless and defamatory allegations.”

Adding that after the cruise, the women “stated they had a great time in text message communications with a crew member.”

Jungle Queens Inc. filed motions to dismiss the complaints, saying the allegations were insufficient. But the case is moving forward, and the women continue to recover from that night.

Teresa Viscovich: “My vision doesn’t line up anymore. Now, it’s like this.”

Teresa says memory issues forced her to give up her nursing license.

Teresa Viscovich: “That was a tough one, because the way it goes is, once a nurse, always a nurse. That was a huge piece of my identity, and it’s gone.”

Both women say they suffer from severe anxiety.

Karren Hanson: “I don’t do a lot of social situations that I used to do because they don’t feel safe anymore.”

They still can’t believe one girls trip could change their lives so much.

ORLANDO — During three years of working as a parade performer at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California, Zach Elefante always has had a second or third job to help him earn a living.

Unlike the experiences of his peers at Disney’s parks in Orlando, where there is a much smaller talent pool, the performers who play Mickey Mouse, Goofy and other beloved Disney characters at the California parks aren’t always provided a consistent work schedule by the company.

It’s among the reasons the California performers are organizing to be represented by a union now, more than four decades after their Florida counterparts did so.

While Disney asks character performers to be available to work at any time, that demand isn’t always rewarded with scheduled work hours, the California performers said.

“A lot of performers get the sense that if they don’t give their full availability, we won’t be in shows … and that will impact other jobs we need to sustain a living in this area,” said Elefante, who lives in Santa Ana, California.

Earlier this month, the California character performers and the union organizing them, Actors’ Equity Association, said they had filed a petition for union recognition.

It’s a different era and a different union doing the organizing this time around, so the California character and parade performers likely will avoid some of the bad blood that the Disney performers in Florida have experienced with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

It has been a rocky four-decade marriage in Florida between the performers who put the “magic” in the Magic Kingdom and the Teamsters, a union historically formed for transportation and warehouse workers which had deep ties to organized crime until the late 1980s.

Why now for the California character performers, so many decades after their Florida counterparts organized? Unlike in Florida where performing as a character often is a full-time job, many of the character performers in Southern California have multiple other gigs, often in Hollywood movies and TV.

Elefante performs at rival Universal Studios Hollywood and works as a tour guide for the movie studios. In addition to performing in the “Fantasmic!” show at Disneyland, Chase Thomas works as the director of operations for a theater festival and previously has had jobs as a visual effects coordinator and entertainment licensing agent.

Angela Nichols moved to California to be a TV writer and often works as a writer in addition to her job as an entertainment host at Disneyland, where she assists the character performers when they’re interacting with guests.

“Disney really is a cornerstone of the stories we grow up with in our culture. Being able to watch people immersed in these stories and live it out is magical,” Nichols said. “And when we’re being supported as cast members and performers, we’re able to make that happen. We’re just not being set up for success in the way we need to be at this time.”

When many of their Hollywood gigs dried up because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent actors’ and writers’ strikes, the character performers wanted more consistent scheduling at Disneyland once it reopened after a yearlong, pandemic-related closure. The pandemic also made them more alert to health and safety concerns concerning things like hugging guests or having sanitary costumes.

Most of the more than 35,000 workers at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California already were unionized, and the parades and character department members were among the holdovers.

“A lot of cast members want to do this fulltime and make it work,” Thomas said.

Unlike their Florida counterparts, the character performers in California are being organized by a union devoted to performers. As such, Actors’ Equity Association officials understand the unique needs of the theme park performers in ways that would be difficult for other unions to grasp.

When there is a new stage show, the shoes of the costumes need to be tested to make sure the performers won’t trip or slip on stage. Union representatives make sure “face performers,” whose faces are visible, such as Cinderella, have the right makeup and double check that parade dancers have ice packs available to nurse sore knees.

Unclean costumes are a perennial problem, and it was a top reason for the Florida performers wanting to organize with the Teamsters in the early 1980s. The other reasons included kids kicking Disney villains like Captain Hook in the shins and adults grabbing at the chests of performers playing Mickey Mouse to see if there was a man or woman underneath.

Clean costumes were so important to the Florida character performers that more than two decades ago the Teamsters successfully inserted a contract clause to assign individual undergarments that the performers could take home to wash after pubic lice and scabies were shared via the garments.

There always existed a culture clash in Florida between the costumed character performers and the traditional Teamsters union leaders of truck drivers and warehouse workers. The drivers often viewed the performers as living charmed lives, paid to dress up every day as if it were Halloween.

Those tensions came to a head in the late 2010s as a new leader of the local Teamsters affiliate in Orlando began targeting the costumed character performers for harassment. The character performers pushed back and the fight went up to James Hoffa, then-head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who intervened.

In California, Elefante is hopeful union representation will give performers a voice in decisions about issues including the larger-than-life costumes, which can cause long-term injuries when ill-fitted, and the safety of performing in parades during rain.

“It’s about having a seat at the table and being a part of the conversation from the performers’ perspective,” Elefante said.

By MIKE SCHNEIDER with contribution from Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin in Orange County, California.