Orange Is the New Black

scrubs. But on movie nights, just before the screening was to begin, Pop would sweep into the room, freshly showered and clad in pale blue men’s pajamas.
    The pajamas were one of those elusive items that had once beensold by the commissary but then were discontinued. They were the plainest men’s pajamas, of a semisheer white cotton-poly. (Pop’s had somehow been dyed for her.) I had wanted a pair desperately for months after arriving in prison. So when Pop presented me with a specially procured pair, I did an ecstatic dance around her cube, hopping madly until I beaned myself on the metal bunk bed frame. Now Toni and Rosemarie would say, “Do the pajama dance, Piper!” and I would dance around in my PJs, as ecstatic as Snoopy doing the Suppertime Dance. The pajamas were not for sleeping. I only wore them on the weekends, to movie night or other special occasions, when I wanted to look pretty. I felt so damn good in those pajamas.
    Pop loved
Walking Tall.
She preferred a straightforward movie storyline, with maybe a little romance thrown in. If the movie was sappy, she would cry, and I would make fun of her, and she would tell me to shut up. She wept at
Radio
, while I rolled my eyes at the Italian Twins.
    After
House of Sand and Fog
, she turned to me. “Did you like that?”
    I shrugged. “Eh? It was okay.”
    “I thought that was your kind of movie.”
    I would never live down the shame of having enthusiastically recommended
Lost in Translation
when it had screened earlier in the year. The ladies of Danbury widely and loudly declared it “the worst movie
ever.
” Boo Clemmons laughed, shaking her head. “All that talking, and Bill Murray doesn’t even get to fuck her.”
    Movie night was as much about eating as anything else. Pop would prepare a special Saturday movie meal that was a respite from the endless march of starch in the dining hall dictated by the BOP. The competitive tension of the salad bar on a rare day when broccoli or spinach or—miracle of miracles
—sliced onions
appeared was a welcome change from the monotony of cucumbers and raw cauliflower—I refused to live on potatoes and white rice. I would wield the plastic tongs with a smile, eyeing Carlotta Alvarado across the salad bar as we both tried to fill our little bowls with the good vegetables faster than the other—me to wolf down immediately with oil and vinegar, she to smuggle out in her pants to cook later.
    Chicken day was pandemonium. First of all, everyone wanted to get as much chicken as the kitchen line workers would give them. This is where it came in handy to be in tight with Pop. The rules of scarcity govern prison life: accumulate when the opportunity presents itself, figure out what to do with your loot later.
    Sometimes, however, there were plans for that chicken. Often on a chicken day Rosemarie would plan to cook us a special meal. Toni and I would be asked to abstain from chicken-eating in the chow hall and to instead stick the bird in our pants, to be smuggled out for use in some elaborate, quasi-Tex-Mex creation later that evening. This required a plastic Baggie or a clean hair net, procured from a kitchen worker or an orderly. Slip the foodstuffs into the appropriate wrapping at the table, shove it down the front of your pants, and stroll out as nonchalantly as you could with contraband chicken riding on your hip bone.
    The list of important things a prisoner has to lose is very short: good time, visiting privileges, phone access, housing assignment, work assignment, participation in programs. That’s basically it. If they catch you stealing onions, a warden can take one of those things away, or can give you extra work. Other than that, the only other option is the SHU. So will a warden be willing to lock up onion thieves and chicken smugglers in Seg?
    Let’s put it another way: room in the SHU is a finite resource, and the warden and his staff have to use it judiciously. Fill the SHU up with chickenshit offenders, and then what are you going to do with someone who’s actually done something serious?
    B IRTHDAYS WERE a true oddity in prison. Many people refused to reveal theirs, whether out of paranoia or simply because they didn’t want it observed by others. I was not one of these holdouts and was trying hard to be upbeat about celebrating my birthday in Danbury, telling myself things like “At least it’s only one,” and “At least it’s not forty.”
    In a peculiar Camp ritual, a prisoner’s