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bag lady. I remember the time when I was six, holding my mother’s hand, and I saw an old woman using her stuffed and tattered shopping bags to shield her face from the arctic air near our home. Her bare ankles were red-veined poles stuck into cracked black shoes with torn newspaper sticking out at the heels. Her layers of shredded sweaterswere held together with safety pins. Even when I was a kid I somehow knew she didn’t have a place to live, that she was frightened and alone.
    I vividly recall the image and tell the group that I have always feared being abandoned and penniless and ending up on the streets.
    One of us—we are so conjoined in our thinking that later I don’t remember if it was one of the other three or me—says, “That’s it, that’s the blog—The Bag Lady—it will be about your worst fears.”
    â€œBag Lady Chronicles,” someone else calls out.
    We finally settle on The Bag Lady Papers. It’s a perfect title that says exactly how I feel and what I want to write about. Half an hour later, with notes in my clammy-with-anxiety hands and some idea of how to proceed, Richard and I hop into a taxi, and he drops me at home.
    I’m dazed but energized; I write several hundred words and shoot them through cyberspace to Tina. A few hours later, one of her editors, the sympathetic and smart Jane Spencer, arrives at my apartment and we work deep into the night on the first installment of The Bag Lady Papers.
    I am totally unprepared for what follows after the first blog hits The Beast. I read a few comments on the first day. Then I stop reading.
    There are hundreds of vitriolic readers who think I’m a rich bitch and an uncaring elitist who was greedy and a fool to put all my money with the MF. They say I’m exploiting Carmina, that I am completely out of touch with the world, prancing around in my starched white shirts and haughtyattitudes. A friend who is horrified by the rage and the cruelty tells me that a commenter—anonymous of course—has written that he wishes I would fall seriously ill. Someone else wishes I’d “be cornholed in a dark alley.”
    But hundreds of others, the same friend reports to me, write that they understand and know what it’s like to be in my shoes (Manolos then, Keds now), and to have lost every hard-earned cent that I saved for retirement. Or, to be more precise, to have it stolen.
    I consider responding directly to the bloggers. Of going mano a mano with a challenge: Here’s my personal e-mail, write me without the cloak of anonymity that lets you say any damn thing you like. Tell me about your own life and your own fears. Call me on the phone. Meet me in a coffee shop. I’d like to know more about you.
    Meeting the bloggers via e-mail, phone, or even face-to-face could be a valuable experience or a waste of energy. I must use the hours I have to figure out how to make money, how to stay afloat, how to stay sane and stable and decent in a world that is unkind and unfair most, but not all, of the time.
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    My pay for the blog adds up to what I used to spend treating a friend to lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant. But it’s a mountain of money to me now. I’ve also written a long piece for The Sunday Times of London. They’re wiring me the fee. It can’t happen fast enough.
    Every day I still go to the studio, trying not to thinkabout how soon I will have to give it up. I arrive around six in the morning. I make notes for another blog and then focus on my photography with fanatical concentration.
    Normally I would leave the studio around six or seven to join Paul or other friends for dinner. But since the MF catastrophe, I stay until nine or ten at night. Nonstop work helps to keep the ever-circling demons at bay. And really, I don’t know what else to do with myself.
    I’ve e-mailed and called the agent of the building to see if it would be possible to renegotiate