It was a panhandle pile-on.
Woody, the cowboy from “Toy Story,” kicked it off by offering to pose for a picture with my son, Finn, 13, and my youngest daughter, Ruby, 9, in Times Square one afternoon last week.
Suddenly, Minnie Mouse appeared at his side, followed by two Hello Kitties, who hustled over to get in on the action.
Say cheeeeeeese.
I thanked the quartet for the iPhone moment but the cartoon characters didn’t move on. They stood their ground expectantly with their oversize heads and those vacuous doll eyes, which I always found to be slightly freaky.
“We work for tips,” Woody said.
I saw that coming but played dumb.
“How much?” I asked.
One Hello Kitty now had her mask off. She was very serious. She also bore a striking resemblance to an Oompa-Loompa from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
“$1. $2. $5,” Kitty said, suggesting a range of options.
“Each?” I asked. “One for everyone?”
“Yes, each,” she said.
Welcome to the new Times Square, where panhandler-performers dressed like Elmo, Spider-Man, Lady Liberty and other characters descend on tourists hoping to get a bit of their cash.
Daily News photographer Susan Watts and I pretended to be tourists in Times Square with my real-life kids in tow. The mission: gauge the civility, or lack of it, shown by the new crop of freelance characters working the Crossroads of the World.
Since January, there have been several arrests for groping women and assault. On Saturday, a Brooklyn man dressed as Spider-Man was busted after he decked a cop who intervened in a dispute between the wall-crawler character and a woman over a tip for a photograph.
Some have complained that the Elmo crowd is overly aggressive in their solicitations — and downright nasty when they are turned down.
Pardon the pun, but it’s all pretty comical.
We encountered one grumpy Statue of Liberty. When I balked at paying for a photo, he abruptly whisked off the fake crowns he placed on Finn and Ruby’s heads, and quickly took back his other props — an American flag and inflatable rubber torch.
But the afternoon overall was remarkably tame. Most of the panhandler-performers seemed to be hardworking — and very hot in heavy outfits on a humid day — immigrants who, at most, were at times a tad persistent in requesting a “tip.”
When I was a teenager, I was a tourist of sorts. We’d pile in my older brother Jimmy’s battered Pontiac Catalina convertible and head into the city from New Jersey. We’d come to see bands like the Clash at Bonds in Times Square, the Fleshtones at CBGB in the Bowery and X at some dive in Coney Island.
Times Square was a parade of junkies, prostitutes, pimps and tough nuts who looked like they just got out of jail or would soon be in one. There were 1,841 murders in New York in 1981 — about 600 more than the student population of my suburban high school in North Brunswick, N.J.
I could never have imagined coming back to Times Square someday with kids of my own, or that the quality-of-life concern of the moment would be Elmo, Cookie Monster and Hello Kitty.
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