The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney

or to write a thoughtful e-mail, the world seems a more humane, habitable place indeed. I like to think I’ve done the right thing by friends in need over the years, but now more than ever I know the power of small kindnesses.
    Many, many friends have reached out to me in immensely generous ways. Cathryn says she would like to pay the rent on the studio for a month, until I can see my way clear to what my next steps with my work might be.
    Stephen, a longtime Condé Nast pal, practically has me belly-laughing the way I did in the old days when he calls and declares, “I know you, girlfriend, you’ll want to stay with your fancy colorist, Kyle. An uptown girl like you wants to look her best. And honey, I know these colorists. They are definitely not cheap. You’ve gotta let me pay! I did it for my aunt, now I want to do it for you!”
    â€œYou may be right,” I say. “Thank god I had the roots done two days before the MF thing. I am nervous about home-colored highlights. I could very easily turn out looking like a Russian hooker a century past her prime—”
    â€œLet me do this for you!” he says. “Call me when you want highlights and a blow-dry!”
    My friends Alice and Tommy call almost every day. They invite me to get some sun with them down in the Caribbean, to stay in their weekend house. Tommy asks me: “What is your strategy, AP?”
    â€œStrategy?” I reply in a sort of dazed way. “I haven’t thought of a strategy. I’m just panicky and poor.”
    â€œI’ll sit down with you and go over the numbers,” he says. Tommy is a serious money guy and this is an amazing offer. “Let’s see how you’re going to get through this.”
    Several weeks later, he huddles with me in a corner of an Italian trattoria, pen and paper in hand. At the end of lunch, I have homework to do: fill numbers into the columns he’s made and make careful lists of how much money I spend each month, another list of rock-bottom necessities, and yet another of possible income sources. He is optimistic that we’ll find a way to pay the rent for the studio. We’ll meet again todetail a new budget. Here is a busy, important guy, a chairman of major boards, taking hours out of his day to help me with basic arithmetic! My world is still shattered into a million shards but my friends are helping me to glue it back together. Good friends, I’m beginning to think, might be the best cure for bag lady syndrome.
    Since writing the blogs, I’ve done several TV and radio shows where I’ve commented on the MF. A producer at CNN called about a story on the MF and his victims, Madoff: Secrets of a Scandal . It turns out that the host of the report, Christine Romans, identifies with my fears of being a bag lady. We discussed how we both have worked and saved and feared that all our hard-earned money would disappear and we’d end up homeless and frightened and alone.
    I agreed to be on the show, if they would come to the studio. I can do it only between the calls I have to make to the lawyers and accountant who are helping me with Madoff-related work, such as filing the SIPC insurance claim. All the MF’s casualties must hire professionals to decipher the arcane language of the endless forms. Another outrage that assails me almost daily.
    The CNN program spawned something like two million Web site click-throughs on my “victim” story (I prefer the word “casualty” because it implies wounds that all of us have sustained). One minute after the program aired on a Saturday night I received two messages on my answering machine. The first was a lawyer from New Jersey, phoning with his wife to say how sorry they were about my recent and ongoing travails. They said that I had real courage andfelt sure I’d be okay. A few days later, I called the number they left to thank them for their concern and their encouraging words.
    A