After seeing Walt Disney's Mary Poppins for the first time, every American child between the ages of three and ten wants a nanny. Someone who doesn't need public transportation because she had her umbrella. Someone who hangs out with chimney sweeps. Someone who breaks into song every five minutes. Someone, in other words, who is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Here in America it's not easy to find a nanny like Miss Poppins. For one thing, British accents are hard to come by. And no one seems to have that good, old-fashioned Mary Poppins common sense and stability.

Perhaps Boston-area parents of the 90s need to look further for such wholesomeness--not necessarily across the Atlantic, but in the other direction--out West. Perhaps more parents should be checking out Nannies From Utah.

Nannies From Utah, says President Judi M. Rogers, "places full-time nannies mostly on the east coast." Rogers advertises in the yellow pages of Manhattan, New Jersey, Washington D.C., northern Virginia, Baltimore and Boston phone books to target families which might need an 18 to 22 years-old nanny.

But what's the Salt Lake City-East Coast connection? What is it about young female Utahans? Can they sing "A Spoonful of Sugar," too?

Perhaps. But there is definitely a "Mormon mystique," Rogers says. Although "you can't tell them from anyone else," Young Mormon women are perceived as more cleancut and all-American than their East Coast sister, according to Rogers. "Utah catches their eye," she says. "They think, `Mormon.'"

Yet Rogers says that there might be some degree of truth to Easterners' image of the typical Utah nanny.

"They raise their women to be domestic and maternal," says Rogers.

But Malena R. Turner, a 20-year-old nanny from Utah working in Phoenix, MD, says that the Mormon mystique is frequently just that--mystique.

"We're not that much different from anybody else in the country; we're not Amish or anything," she says. "I think a lot of families think we'd be offended if they drank, or swore. But the we're just like anybody else."

It's not easy to get into Rogers program: only two percent of all applicants are placed in the program.

"If they smoke we don't talk. If they have more than two moving traffic violations, we don't talk," Rogers says of the prospective nannies. "If a young woman doesn't get along with her mother, then she isn't considered. Nannies need to be able to cooperate with another mother figure."

Once women are accepted into the agency, they must take a four-week, four-hours-per-session training course so that they know what to expect and what is expected of them Rogers says.

For nannies, homesickness has to be one of those expectations. "I tell them they need at the least two weeks" to get over the yearning for Utah, says Rogers. Back East, "the air is going to feel different....they're going to the miss the mountains."

And families seeking nannies are also told what to expect. "I'm telling families that they do not clean bathrooms, do dinner dishes, or pick up their coffee cups. These aren't maids. That's why you need an agency," Rogers says. "It all needs to be on the table."