Funny NYT Piece

There's a funny item in tomorrow's NYT about a soap opera that is filmed in a studio in the heart of Orthodox Midwood, Brooklyn - otherwise known as the neighborhood of Flatbush:

The show has been filmed in New York for its entire 51-year history, and it’s safe to say that its souped-up world of sex and chicanery rarely resembles life on the sidewalks outside. But seven years ago the producers moved their studio from Midtown to Midwood, and with a healthy dose of real estate irony, the relocation coincided with a sharp growth in the local Orthodox Jewish community. As Midwood’s Orthodox population soared to perhaps three-quarters of the neighborhood, the gap between sidewalk and soap opera became a gulf.

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.”

...This is such stuff as housewives’ dreams are made on. But not the housewives pushing prams past the studios on their way to the Chap-A-Nosh restaurant. Nor the girls from the Zionist yeshiva across the street, who swish past hundreds of pounds of oatmeal sitting on the studio’s loading dock, completely unaware that it will be transformed into quicksand from which a desperate heroine will soon be struggling to free herself in a most alluring manner.

Of course, anyone familiar with the area - and the "Zionist Yeshiva" they describe (Shulamith School for Girls) - will remember that the soap opera Another World filmed in the studio for decades. There were even rumors when I was a teenager of a male star from the soap opera who tried (unsuccessfully, the story goes) to pick up Shulamith girls he thought were cute.

I guess this article goes to prove that despite indications to the contrary in many mixed communities, disparate elements can still coexist in the same neighborhood without all hell breaking loose.