“She really seems to be adjusting fine,” says a source close to Stewart (above, after sentencing in July). Photo by: BEBETO MATTHEWS / AP
Doing Her Time | Martha Stewart
Jose Figueroa had driven 320 miles to see his girlfriend at Alderson Federal Prison Camp in rural West Virginia. The Akron printer had brought along his children Miranda, 12, and Manny, 7, and on the crisp Sunday morning of Oct. 10 both were playing on a swing set outside the visitor center. As Manny propelled himself upward he heard a woman’s voice from another swing. "She said, ‘You can swing high,’" Manny recalls. "‘Can you swing higher?’"

The woman was Martha Stewart, and she herself had swung to a new low. It was her third day in prison, and she’d endured a mandatory strip search and the issuance of prison khakis and T-shirt. And yet there were splashes of color in her bleak new world. Joining 59 other women in a dormitory-style "cottage," she was assigned a lower bunk – a good thing in prison living. As, apparently, was the welcome from many fellow prisoners. "My mom told me (Stewart) was bombarded by inmates saying, ‘Hey, Martha,’ " says Cornell University freshman Crystal Thomas, 18, who was visiting her mother at Alderson. "She would just smile and wave."

It appears the multimillionaire, beginning a five-month sentence for conspiracy and obstruction of justice, is working hard to fit in. "She wants to be friendly and open," says R. Couri Hay, society editor for Hamptons magazine. "I was told she said, ‘I just want to be one of the girls.’"