Oh, Carolina Gliding past luxurious shops in a high-end mall, CAROLINA looks like all the other patrons…..the executive class…..the professional class….rich men's wives. BUT she's not shopping, she's foraging, scavenging. It's a guilty secret she's half keeping from herself: with that crisp, lacquer, paper bag from a "flagship store," the truth is she's a Bag Lady. Her sole refuge is her car. It's become her "mobile home." A "Champagne-color" Cadillac Brougham, the exact twin to the one her ex-husband drives. It's all that remains of the days when they were a "perfect couple." He's a top-gun lawyer. She's no longer the chief recipient of his go-for-the jugular earning skills; she's the chief object of his wrath. Cut off with out a cent she's in a kind of free-fall. The lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder fly past her as she plummets straight for the bottom. It's true; she's a bit "spoiled." Like a peacock in a chicken coop, she looks out of place at the temp employment center. Question: Previous occupation? Answer: Spending money. Question: Address? Answer: My car. The bottom is waiting for her. It arrives when her car breaks down at the edge of town. What's the bottom like? It calls for the ingenuity of a Robinson Crusoe and the caginess of a pool hustler. It's a "jungle adventure," played out in a lush subtropical suburb in Florida. Life at the bottom doesn't give up its secrets easily. Friends can help more, enemies can hurt more. She meets new people. There's Rabbit, a Caribbean vagrant, Lola, a teenage runaway, JJ Jeeter and his wife Jean. She has a brother…Glenn. If his life once seemed like "wretched poverty with questionable occupation", it now looks like a "pretty good set-up." She has a pair of real friends from her old life, Penny and Lee, who somehow manage to remain connected with her, as she sheds her old identity the was a snake sheds its skin. Cast off, she starts to recycle herself. Slipping like a spy into her upper-class skin, she sells real estate for Penny. At the flea market, she occupies a grey area between "junk" and "antiques" and finds herself "working with wood." Playing matchmaker to a pedigreed dog, she finds lodgings for a goat for which she has become responsible. An "ecological niche" begins to emerge; she's been reinvented, only partly by herself.