Is anyone else loving the latest Netflix series “Orange is the New Black”? It’s growing on me.

It’s causing us to speak in ‘prison hypotheticals’, how we would spend our time if we were ever behind bars.

We’ve thrown around the normal responses.  I’d read a lot, exercise, do yoga, write.  Like you’d go into prison all scrawny and stupid, and then come out wordly, with a masters and abs you could grate cheese over.

But, what we are imagining is not prison, it’s more what would you do if you had to be on holiday for a year.  Prison would be rife with danger.   Man alive, I would not want to imagine how much of a target I’d be in the slammer.  I’d be sold for a pack of cigarettes in ten seconds flat.

In this program, a yuppy New Yorker is serving a sentence for some incidental drug smuggling she did…once…ten years ago.  And so far, she is not coping well.  Who can blame her, that would be a tough crowd.

“Imagine trying to find a seat in the cafeteria on the first day of prison?” Ben asks.

“I’d be more afraid of the first shower” I grimace.

To be separated from loved ones, to be treated dismissively. I don’t like to be yelled at, I reckon I would cry every single day in prison, until I could eventually start my own gang.  But not a violent gang, we’d have a book club, and talk about George Clooney.

But think of the material you’d get from a prison sentence.  The source material came from the memoir, and this excerpt is from the website:

Following a plea deal for her 10-year-old crime, Piper Kerman spent a year in the infamous women’s correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, which she found to be no “Club Fed.” In Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, Piper takes readers into B-Dorm, a community of colorful, eccentric, vividly drawn women. Their stories raise issues of friendship and family, mental illness, the odd cliques and codes of behavior, the role of religion, the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailor, and the almost complete lack of guidance for life after prison.

I mean, that book practically wrote itself.  It’s the kind of break a writer can only dream of.  And now she’s doing speaking engagements all over, and is on the board of directors for women’s prisons.  Talk about lemons from lemonade.  And why not? Best to do something with all that time.  That and get wicked six-pack-abs.

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