DanMargarita.com

If you've been living in the United States recently and can read and understand English, then you're aware that TV homemaking icon, Martha Stewart has been convicted on several charges including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements. The "domestic diva" could be spending the next several years in an interior decoratively challenged "big house."

Her picture was on the front page of almost every major newspaper in the country with most featuring the same up-close headshot of Stewart. Some papers, especially those of a more tabloid nature, presented the photo in an extreme close-up. The closer the photo, the more nefarious she appeared. I imagine the National Inquirer showed the photo of just her nostrils.

For me, the image of Martha Stewart in prison is a tough one to conceive, though many seem to be gleefully doing just that. Perhaps I can get a better handle on it if I picture Martha starring in what is arguably the greatest prison movie of all-time, "Cool Hand Luke." I do strange things like that.

The film stars Paul Newman as a charismatic, anti-establishment prisoner in the Deep South in the late 1940's, whose spirit cannot be broken by his overseers. Newman's character is sentenced to two years in prison for cutting the heads off of several parking meters while intoxicated. That's two years more than Martha was sentenced to for running into her neighbor's landscaper with her car.

In our film, "Cool Hand Martha" arrives and along with the other new prisoners, is given a list of rules to abide by.

"Any woman turning routine prison items into useful household items spends...a night in 'the box.' Any woman who misspells her calligraphy spends...a night in 'the box.' Any woman not promptly responding to RSVP's spends...a night in 'the box.'"

Ms. Stewart is known for being demanding and I can easily see her leading a prison revolt like in so many classic prison movies. Let's go to the prison cafeteria now where a fed-up (pardon the pun) Martha cajoles her fellow (or whatever the female equivalent of "fellow" is) inmates into banging their tin cups on the table, refusing top go back to their cells unless their steak tips get marinated.

"Hell no. We won't go. Until you cook our steak tips slow."

Like the irrepressible Luke, Martha might continuously try to escape, perhaps tying her cell doilies (what else would she have in her cell?) together to make a rope to climb over the wall.

Should that fail, Martha's next attempt might be while working on a chain gang. After throwing yet another shovel full of gravel onto a hot tar road, Cool Hand Martha would try to isolate herself from the group.

"Pruning flowers here, Boss" states Martha before jumping into a prison vehicle on a flight to freedom.

Of course Martha's proclivity for domestic ingenuity would probably grate on the prison's Strother Martin-like warden, who like in the movie, would eventually explode in anger at Martha.

"Now what we got here...is a failure...to communicate! You turn one milk carton into a planter, you get one set of chains. You turn two milk cartons into planters, you get two sets of chains. You won't need no third set of chains. You turn one more milk carton into a planter, and we gonna kill ya, Martha."

With her clout, support from her family and friends as well as her sheer mettle, Martha Stewart should survive her prison stint in a pretty good mental state.

Of course, if you haven't seen "Cool Hand Luke," this column makes even less sense than usual.