VANCOUVER -- After years of living it up in New York, Canadian porn star Kathryn Gannon will enter the more modest surroundings of a U.S. prison today to begin serving a three-month sentence for her role in a sensational insider-trading case.

Life at the Women's Correctional Center in Danbury, Conn., will mark a considerable change of pace for Ms. Gannon, who recently pleaded guilty to receiving illegal stock tips from her former lover, Wall Street banker James McDermott. But as she prepared to board the flight to New York on Saturday, the 33-year-old native of Prince George, B.C., seemed surprisingly upbeat about the prospect of spending the next 90 days in a minimum-security prison.

"The soap opera continues," said Ms. Gannon -- known in pornography circles as Marylin Star -- who was accompanied on the trip by her new boyfriend.

Decked out in jeans and baseball caps, the couple were virtually indistinguishable from the dozens of other travellers who lined up at Vancouver Airport for the five-hour trip to New York.

Far from fearing life in a U.S. jail cell, Ms. Gannon appears to be taking the circumstances that confront her in stride.

"I'm looking forward to getting away from honking horns, paying bills, the cellphone ringing, people yelling screaming and fighting," she said. References to fighting are clearly aimed at what she called a "dysfunctional relationship" with her estranged husband, Michael Gilley, the Vancouver stock promoter she married on Valentine's Day in 2000.