A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

THOUSANDS OF PROSPECTIVE HOME buyers recently converged on a former cattle pasture in Orlando, Florida, hoping to become the first permanent residents of a Disney attraction. It is the new town of Celebration, which is going up just 15 miles south of Cinderella's Castle and the Pirates of the Caribbean.

As familiar Disney melodies (When You Wish upon a Star and M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E) were piped over the loudspeakers, the crowd piled into five tents where names were picked from revolving bins, one for each level of housing: Estate, Village, Cottage, Townhomes and Apartments. There was an extra bin for the rentals. The occasional cheer went up as the winners were read out. People whose number came up early got first crack at signing a contract with one of the approved builders and choosing a house style: Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Coastal, Mediterranean or French. (Alas, nothing resembling the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse.) The first 350 units are scheduled to be occupied by June 1996, but it will take several years for Celebration to reach its full size of 8,000 homesites and a population of 15,000 to 20,000. Sources at Disney estimate that the company will spend $100 million on the entire project, but the entertainment giant stands to make at least three times that amount on lot sales alone. If all goes as planned, Disney will have two Main Street U.S.A.s--one with inhabitants and one without, but both extremely profitable.

With kites flying overhead, clowns on stilts, popcorn vendors, jugglers and puppeteers, the event lived up to the town's name, which was chosen to put future residents in a positive frame of mind from the outset. The streets have been named already, mostly for trees, but Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Drive and Hip-Hip-Hooray Highway would be fine choices for the larger arteries.

Walt Disney himself had the original idea for a Disneyfied utopia, built under a giant dome, where residents would be whooshed from skyscraper to skyscraper on a high-speed monorail. As Walt envisioned it, no retirees would be allowed to live in his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and nobody could own property. It was to be a paradise of young renters, a notion that surely would have been vigorously opposed by the senior-citizen lobby. But Disney died in 1966, before the plans were drawn up.

Somewhere along the line, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow got turned into the epcot theme park, where people could visit the future, but only from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Walt's idea of a utopia with residents was put on hold for a quarter of a century. Only then did the Disney Co., realizing it had more acres than it would ever need for theme parks, put the dream town back on the drawing board.

The dream town of the 1990s doesn't need Walt's domes, skyscrapers or monorails. By offering good schools, clean streets and grass around the edges, Disney is creating a fantasy world so far removed from common experience that people are amazed at the prospect.