Now, when Oakdale’s powerful, scheming blondes and sensitive, square-jawed men step out of the warehouse at Avenue M and East 14th Street, they encounter women wearing very long skirts and men with very long beards.

In Oakdale, your daily life might include falling into a coma, learning that you have an evil twin, or developing amnesia. Your romantic relationships would be more fleeting and unstable than the average high schooler’s. Above all, you would be in constant danger of getting kidnapped — Lily Snyder, for instance, has been kidnapped no fewer than eight times.

Outside the studio, by contrast, all premarital contact between the sexes, even handshakes, is forbidden, and many residents do not allow television into their homes.

Inside the studio, a woman might be hanging from a bell tower by her fingernails, while in the streets outside, the most dramatic scene is the group of elderly people holding court in the kosher Dunkin’ Donuts.

“We’re strangers in a strange land,” said Christopher Goutman, the show’s executive producer. “There aren’t even any bars around here.”

The studio, which was built in the late 1920s, still features Esther Williams’s old pool and more recently provided the setting for “The Cosby Show.” But the good citizens of Midwood are oblivious to the past and present dramas unfolding within the high fortress walls, and even close neighbors are unclear about the building’s function.

The owner of the Korean deli around the corner was sure that some type of cartoon was being filmed there, and the restaurateur across the street insisted that the warehouse contained “the news.” When informed of the building’s true purpose, most were still in the dark.

The move marks the second time in the past few weeks that the MTA has made an effort to improve 7 train service. The first, reported in last week’s paper, was the “Rider Report Cards” that were distributed to riders.

The unlikely solution: collecting take-out menus.

Allmenus.com, an online yellow pages for restaurants, sent him on a quest to reel in menus from eateries across the New York metropolitan area. Four months and one worn out pair of boots later, Rayas has snapped up 10,000 take-out menus.

“My motto is ‘No menu left behind,'” said Rayas, 55, who gets paid $2 for each menu.

It all began one March morning when baby Eva was taking a nap. Rayas — an accountant by trade who worked demolition in El Paso before his move east — was crunching numbers part time for a law firm to pay his rent. But it wasn’t enough. He answered a Craigslist ad: “Earn Money by Collecting Menus.” He sent an e-mail and thought it would go unanswered.

“But the same day I got a response that said, ‘Get started.'”

So Rayas set out from his Washington Heights home in his brand new rust-colored High Sierra boots.

He walked down Broadway. Then he walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, Audubon Avenue and Fort Washington Avenue. “All the numbered streets, too,” Rayas said.

By the end of the day, blisters covered his toes and he limped into a Rite Aid on 125th Street to buy a box of Band-Aids. “I leaned against the wall, took off my socks, popped the blisters and taped up my toes,” Rayas said. “Man, it felt good.”

Months later, he knows to tape up his feet, tighten his shoelaces and check Google Maps before setting out on his evening and weekend menu hunts, which at his current pace would net him about $60,000 a year. His subway and bus maps are covered with yellow and pink highlighter markings, his legs no longer get sore, and he’s lost 20 pounds. Meanwhile, his boss started calling him “the vacuum” for his astounding proficiency in bringing in menus.

. . .

“Chinese people believe in menus,” he said. “Jamaicans don’t. I ask, ‘Do you have a menu?’ They point to the wall.”

In this case, “the farm” is not a euphemism parents might use when the family pet has to take that last fatal trip to the vet. For farm animals found running loose in New York City, it often means taking up residence at Farm Sanctuary, 175 acres of vegan nirvana nestled here among the vineyards and vegetable stands in the Finger Lakes region.

The newest New Yorker to arrive is Lucky Lady, a lamb who was found tearing through the Bronx on June 13. Seeing her agricultural tags, the people who saved Lucky Lady concluded that she had escaped from a live animal market where the culinary and cultural value of certain kinds of meat comes from the timeliness and manner of slaughter.

Lucky Lady, indeed.

At Farm Sanctuary, she is attended by a staff of 16 led by Susie Coston, the shelter director. The sanctuary began in 1989, and Ms. Coston has been there almost as long.

The people who run the sanctuary call Ms. Coston the Jane Goodall for farm animals. The analogy becomes clear when, during an interview, she nestles next to a drooling pig twice her size and rubs its belly, ignoring the animal’s tusks.

Called Mobi-Mats, the blue mats — bought for a total of $130,000 from Deschamps Mat Systems, a French company — are made of polyester and are anchored into the sand by 19-inch heavy-duty staples. The mats are at Beach 116th Street in the Rockaways in Queens, on Orchard Beach in the Bronx, on Midland Beach in Staten Island and on Brighton Beach until Labor Day, a Parks Department spokeswoman said. Each mat runs in a straight line from a boardwalk or pavement toward the water, where it then branches out into a T, and varies in length from 200 to 400 feet, said Katia Taillard, a representative of Deschamps.

The move to install the mats comes after a state audit two years ago, spurred by complaints, that found that the Parks Department was failing to meet many of the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal law that mandates cities to provide equal access to most facilities. Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, pledged to make improvements, and the department has responded by hiring an accessibility coordinator, increasing the number of signs for disabled users and installing special equipment in various playgrounds.

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