Nannies

About three months ago, Samantha Slattery approached her nanny about getting the H1N1 flu vaccine. Slattery, 33, of Topanga, had a 5-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son. The baby was too little to be vaccinated, and Slattery wanted to avoid vaccinating her son. But nanny Blanca Duarte refused. Duarte, 47, said she was afraid the vaccine would make her sick; she had gotten ill after a flu vaccination years before. "For three weeks I could not work," Duarte said. "After that, I said no more."

When we last saw Nanny, she was screaming into a spy camera hidden in a teddy bear. The put-upon heroine of 2002's "The Nanny Diaries" had unleashed a rebuke to her pampered and clueless employers before marching out of their lives and restarting her own. It was a cathartic end to a novel that would go on to sell more than 2 million copies, inspire a movie and launch the careers of its young co-authors, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus....

SERIES Gone Too Far: DJ AM tried to help a 21-year-old meth addict who had been keeping a chilling secret on the final episode of this reality series (10 p.m. MTV). Saturday Night Live: Blake Lively hosts with musical guest Rihanna. (11:29 p.m. NBC). SPECIALS Death Fog: Scientists return to the lakeside village in Cameroon, West Africa, where nearly 2,000 people died in one night in the 1980s, suffocated by a white fog as they slept, according to neighbors (5 and 8 p.m. NGC)

When a nanny with 10 years of experience was let go last year after her Hancock Park employers divorced, she had a hard time finding a new job. After five months of looking, she changed her application at the placement agency from "nanny" to "housekeeper" -- and lowered her hourly rate. It worked. Soon she was hired at a 10,000-square-foot house near Malibu as a housekeeper -- until the family's nanny was laid off.

If the letter from Sherry Steinberg of Santa Monica read like some love story, that's because it was. "I met Lucy in the spring of 1963," began Steinberg's note, submitted after the Home section asked readers to share their stories about the bond between housekeeper and homeowner. Dozens of readers weighed in, describing how a cleaning lady or nanny had become like a sibling, parent or best friend.

When customers sit beneath an intricate gold mural, order kung pao chicken and confide that they've just lost their jobs, waitress Alice Lau understands their hurt and fear. She's feeling the pinch too, as the repercussions of decisions made by others trickle down to her. Her hours at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant have been cut because regulars such as Rogelio Valdez can no longer afford dinners out. Some customers come in for one last meal to tell her they've been laid off, then disappear.

Re "ICE fishing," editorial, March 2 When will The Times stop elevating illegal immigrants to victimhood status? Even if illegal immigrants are waiters, car-washers and nannies, once a court has issued deportation judgments against these individuals, those orders must be enforced. The Times seems impervious to the reality that fugitive status applies both to those who've entered our country illegally and then committed crimes, and to those who've entered illegally and then been issued deportation orders by our courts and ignored them.

Caroline Kennedy's abrupt withdrawal from the New York Senate contest sparked an extraordinary back-and-forth Thursday between rival camps, pitting the erstwhile candidate against the governor she once courted. But the question remained: Why did she quit? A person close to Gov. David Paterson said Kennedy botched her campaign for the seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton and cited allegations regarding taxes, domestic help and Kennedy's marriage, though he offered no proof.