Brother, can you spare a dime for my Gucci bills?

Karyn headed off to the University of Illinois for college, but finished up her marketing and public relations degree at Columbia and jumped quickly from a corporate job at Hyatt Hotels to a more "fun" job as an audience coach for "The Jenny Jones Show" in Chicago. The work suited her hyperactive personality: "I've got a lot of energy, I'm absolutely nuts; it was a great way to burn off my energy every day, clapping my hands," she says.

By 2000, Karyn had moved to New York for a $75,000-a-year producer job at a courtroom television show called "Curtis Court." Later she moved to a $100,000 producer job at "The Ananda Lewis Show," a short-lived talk show featuring a former MTV VJ. When the show failed, Karyn was a casualty. By November of last year, she was unemployed, and discovering that in the post-dot-com post-9/11 economy, there weren't a lot of jobs for TV producers or marketing types, no matter how energetic, fun or accomplished at clapping.

This might not have been such a big problem, were it not for the credit card debt that Karyn had been amassing while employed. Despite her enviable salary, she had not saved a dime. Instead, living in a $2,000-a-month apartment just blocks away from Bloomingdale's, Karyn went on a series of extraordinary shopping sprees, charging a closetful of designer shoes and purses on her numerous credit cards. "I went kind of crazy," she says, only slightly abashed.

Broke, unemployed and $20,000 in debt -- unable even to afford a pedicure, she sighs -- Karyn was a very unhappy camper indeed. "I think a lot of women, whether you're high-maintenance or not -- you identify who you are with what you look like. It was kind of like, when I couldn't color my hair, couldn't do all these things, I kind of got depressed for a while. I couldn't go out and buy cute clothes, I just felt funky every time I went anywhere, in like old clothes, stuff like, ugh. It's just weird, but it's true!" she says, surveying her jean skirt and proclaiming that today she feels "frumpy."

Karyn finally "snapped out of it," and began living a frugal life -- rarely going out, shopping only at Old Navy if at all, cooking for herself, moving to a shared apartment in Brooklyn. Still, even after she got a new job (for half the pay) on an Animal Planet TV show about New Yorkers and their pets, she says she was living hand-to-mouth. Finally, the fateful bounced check triggered a moment of desperation and inspiration, and SaveKaryn.com was born.

There is no subterfuge in the site that Karyn invented in June of this year -- she posted a humorous plea for donations, forthrightly explaining her situation, Gucci shoes and all. "If 20,000 people gave me just $1, I'd be home free, and I'm sure there are 20,000 people out there who have been in my position who can afford to give me $1, who know how I'm feeling," she explains. "That's all I was thinking: that there are nice people, and if people just shared, and if all these wealthy people gave their money to people like me, the economy would be better, it'd be a better place. That's it! If we just kind of balanced out a little bit."

Call it incredibly naive, or incredibly optimistic, but amazingly, it worked. She added a chatty personal diary to the site that documented both the donations she received and her attempts to reduce her living expenses. She also opened an eBay site, where she began auctioning off her designer clothes. The initial trickle of donations grew as the URL was passed around -- many people, apparently, found Karyn's jaw-dropping ballsiness amusing; and then the site exploded as it began showing up in USA Today and the New York Times. The week of Aug. 18, during the peak of publicity, she received $2,630.84 in donations and $682.46 via eBay. Although most donors just chipped in a few dollars, one anonymous donor ponied up a generous $1,000.

In her closet, where the Gucci purses once sat, Karyn now keeps a large plastic bin filled with letters that people have sent her; her bathroom is overflowing with the vanity products -- creams, lotions, shampoos, allergy medicine -- that her adoring readers have sent as consolation. She's received teddy bears, subscriptions to Vogue, Dunkin' Donuts coupons, backpacks, jewelry, cat food, candles, even two free pairs of boots from Chinese Laundry. It's hard to fathom why so many people would spend time and money to help a total stranger pay off her appallingly extravagant spending sprees, but they do: Something about Karyn's story, or approach, or both, clearly hit a nerve.

Why do they do it? Karyn has been asked this question by dozens of reporters, and she has a pat answer ready. "I was just honest about what happened; I didn't make up some sob story about saving the world," she explains, shrugging. Her donors think it's funny, and original, she argues, and view it less as a charity than as an entertainment site.

Comments from her contributors suggest that she's right. "I donated $5 because as far as entertainment value was concerned, her site was worth at least what it would have cost to rent a DVD for the evening," says 27-year-old Ralph Pickering, a network engineer. "It made me smile."

It's also revealing that so many of her donations came from young, Net-savvy people, the same demographic that, like Karyn, has been hit hard by the crash of the dot-com economy, and, as a result, can closely identify with her plight. A quick flip through her letters turns up countless donors who confess their own credit card debt, their own unemployment, and their hopes that a buck for Karyn is essentially a buck for themselves: As one woman put it in a letter, "Maybe I'll get reciprocal karma."

Next Page: "I think Karyn is filling some kind of vacuum the baby boomers have created in our society"

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