Some ideas inspired by this fur pattern thing that's been mentioned earlier. It starts with just some silly ideas that could become a couple of guest strips if I find someone silly enough to draw it ;), and ends up somewhere in the twilight zone...

Strip idea one.
Panel 1: Closeup of Tiffany looking totally flabbergasted, staring at something off-panel.
Tiffany: Leona?! Is that you? What have you done to yourself?
Leona (off-panel): I got a pattern dye job. Goodbye, solid color!

Panel 2: Tiffany and Leona in silhouette (so we still don't see what Leona looks like now).
Can't remember the exact original dialog, but the gist of it is that Leona thinks she's ready to compete with Tiffany (and to a lesser extent other pattern furs) on equal terms now.
Tiffany: Okay, whatever rocks your boat. But honestly, Leona..

Third and final panel: We finally see what Leona's dye job looks like. Oh my...
Tiffany: Who on Earth do you think you're going to impress with POLKADOTS???

Curtain. Hmm, that really needs to be in colour...
Anyway, after a while I came up with a "sequel" that borrows (to use the polite term) a gag from [i]Animaniacs[/i].

Strip idea two.
It's supposed to be in a slightly special format. The main part is a poster or magazine ad dominated by a big picture of the polkadotted Leona in a pose suggesting that she's dancing a certain kind of dance, grinning like a  Cheshire cat and possibly wearing a silly costume. There may be some musicians in the background and other details I'll leave for the artist to decide.
The heading reads POLKA, DOT? or possibly POLKA, DOT! with a small LET'S in the corner. (i.e. either POLKA DOT? or LET'S POLKA, DOT!) Smaller text under the picture reads POLKA IS [i]IN[/i], followed by even smaller text saying SAYS DOTTY THE POLKADOT LION. This is followed by more text and pictures promoting a new series of polka records or something.
Under this is a three panel strip showing Leona's reaction.

Panel 1: She is "discussing" the ad/poster with the designer. That is, she stares wildly at it and roars: "DOTTY?!"
The designer replies calmly: "Yeah, it's a play on words, see? We tried "Leona the Polkadot Lion" but it just didn't work..."

Panel 2: Leona marches out of the room slamming the door real hard (feel free to exagerrate with cracking glass, loosening hinges etc.) as she roars: "Neither do I!" (I.e. she doesn't work - not under those conditions.)

Panel 3: She's sitting in a furdresser's chair and tells him briskly: "You heard me -- solid black!"

Curtain. And that's probably the last we'll see of the idea in SJ if any of  it gets in there at all, because the next idea I got grew into something bigger and more sinister. "Our" Leona may just have saved herself from a terrible fate by making that last decision above...


In fact it grew into an eerie kind of story that may work better independently, but that would require more work to establish a new character who's similar to Leona... Or it could be a "what if" story set a couple of years back before Leona started distrusting Woody.

It starts with him, you see. One day he contacts Leona and tells her he's got a great opportunity for her. He can't give her all the details yet, but it involves fame, fortune and regular work for the foreseeable future. There is just one catch: She has to dye her fur polkadot!
Leona ponders the suggestion for a while, and a couple of days later she turns up at Woody's office looking totally wild. Woody introduces her to an executive from a major TV company, and after she has signed a nondisclosure  agreement, he tells her that they are planning a new kid series starring (you guessed it) "Dotty, the Polkadot Lion", and with her new look Leona is just the one they've been looking for to play Dotty.
Blinded by the promise of stardom, Leona signs the proffered contract without asking further questions, such as what kind of character this Dotty is. When she asks when they are going to start shooting, the executive points out a couple of special clauses that have to be taken care of. First, of course, she has to take polka lessons. Second, because she has this reputation for blowing up at people, she has to undergo hypnotherapy to control her rage.
Of course she has already accepted these conditions by signing the contract, but she doesn't really have anything against them anyway. Dancing is fun, and it's not like she WANTS to hate the world after all...

A couple of busy weeks follow, with dance lessons a couple of times a week and long therapy sessions every day. Leona soon masters the dance, but has no idea how the therapy is going because she can't remember any of it! All she knows is that she goes to the therapist's office (which is conveniently located near the studio) every morning, she gets hypnotized, and then it's all a blank until she is ready to leave in the afternoon. The people at the studio are keeping their cards close to their chests too - nobody ever shows her any scripts or even gives her a hint about what her character is like.
One day she starts wondering just how long a major TV studio can wait for a big production to begin, so after the day's therapy is over she walks over to the studio to find someone to ask. As she enters the foyer, the receptionist looks up and says "Hi again. Forgot something?" Funny thing to  say considering she has never been there before!
After a few moments of awkward silence the receptionist glances at the clock and says quickly, "Sorry, I thought you were someone else!"
Someone else with this fur? Leona thinks, then she drops the subject as if is was snatched out of her mind, and asks to see the director.

Okay, I added a few details while typing up this that should give the sharpest readers an idea of what's going on here. As for Leona, she is still in for the surprise of her life, so let's get on with it...

Leona asks the director when the shooting is going to start, and to her surprise he tells her (after a moment's hesitation) that there is no need to worry about that, they have started already. In fact the pilot episode is finished and scheduled to air at 6 PM that afternoon!
Then he excuses himself and wanders off before Leona has time to ask any more questions, and she finds that she has just time to run a couple of errands - to which she quickly adds going to the video store to pick up a blank tape - and be home in time for the show, so she just leaves and decides to let the show answer any other questions she may have.
Only as the title sequence starts running does she realize that the nondisclosure agreement she signed must have expired now that the show is making its debut, and she really ought to have told her friends about her big break and invited them to watch the show with her. Oh well, she's taping it, so she can always show it off later!

At 7:05 PM Leona picks up the remote, stops the VCR and starts rewinding the tape, turns off the TV and just sits for a long time pondering what she has just seen. And she thought Yin's conspiracy theories were wild!
Just as her name and fur suggested, Dotty turned out to be a wild, crazy character who's always cheerful, laughs at everything and polkas rather than walking everywhere. In short, a character as different from Leona as humanely (or should that be lionly?) possible. And judging from the reactions of the studio audience, she is the next big hit. But that wasn't really a surprise.
The surprise was this: It wasn't someone else playing the role. It was her, Leona. And she could swear on her mother's grave that she had never set paw in that studio before. Not to mention that she could never play a role like that.
The tape stops rewinding, and she turns the TV back on and starts going through the show scene by scene, almost frame by frame.
Her face.
Her figure.
Her dyed fur, with every spot in the right place.
Her gestures.
Her voice, with a slightly annoying whiney undertone. Definitely her accent.
Her eyes, occasionally with a peculiar clouded expression, almost like a sleepwalker.
A sleepwalker, or...

Okay, has anyone NOT got it yet? I think Leona has. The next day she goes straight to the studio to confront the producer. He explains that they had a problem with her: As far as they could tell she was ideal for the role as far as her appearance was concerned. Personality wise it was an entirely different matter. They knew she could never play the role convincingly while burdened with her true personality, so they came up with the idea of hypnotizing her and giving her a new fake personality - Dotty. That, by the way, explains why Leona was not mentioned in the credits (a fact Leona was far too upset to notice at the time). Apart from distributors not wanting to touch the notorious Leona with a ten-foot boom mike, technically speaking Dotty did actually play herself - she just used Leona's body to do it.
[A little side note - I don't quite remember where I was going to put this. Contrary to popular belief, people can only be hypnotized to do things they really want to do and probably could have been persuaded to do anyway. So it looks like either Leona really wanted to get a different personality (as I said above, it's not like she WANTED to hate the world), or her desire for fame and fortune is so strong that she doesn't really care about the means by which she gets it. Or maybe she's just so easy to split and mold because she was schizophrenic in the first place!]

Another little addition to the scene above: After going through the tape a second time and starting to figure it out, Leona gets to her feet and walks over to a poster on the wall that at least some readers will have no trouble with recognizing - it's the cover picture from Pink FLoyd's "Dark side of the moon". She stands looking at it for a moment, perhaps touching it, and whispers:
"There's someone in my head and it's not me..."

Okay, where were we? Leona soon discovers the truth in the old (?) adage "Be careful what you wish for". She has always yearned for fame, fortune and recognition, but she appears to have bartered away her soul to get there. Not to mention that she is recognized as someone else!
Of course she tries to get out of the mess she got herself into, but she soon finds that the investors have made a really good effort to protect their investment. They haven't hired her - they have bought her. They own her, body and soul, and there is no legal way she can get away from having to share both of the above with that silly polkadot lion. She might in fact have been better off if she actually had sold her soul to the devil. At least then her life would have been her own until she died.
But her life is not her own, and she soon finds she can do less with her fortune than without it. She was allowed some freedom before she found out about Dotty, but now she knows the truth she is confined to quarters lest she go out and cause some scandal that would ruin Dotty's reputation. A songbird in a gilded cage...

From here there are three possible endings (well, three that I've come up with so far anyway), but this stupid word processor is running out of buffer space and can't increase it, so I guess I'll have to put the rest in a different file. In fact I just started doing that (moving the endings to the other file) but accidentally did two cuts in a row, wiping out everything I had written after the above. Oh well, more typing training for me... :p