By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I am that idiot who invariably has a hair blowout scheduled on the day of the downpour. Essentially I pay a lot of money to look wonderful mostly inside the salon, where everyone has nicer hair than I do anyway. It’s curtains to sleekness once I step out on the street, where good hair might actually matter.  That’s how I found myself leaving my hair place with a shower cap on my head, as I ran to get my son a cup of cold brew.

“Take a second shower cap to make sure you stay dry,” Svetlana told me, as if wearing a single shower cap wasn’t indignity enough. Wait till you’re out the door to put them on, she said, because someone will think you’re leaving here with a treatment on your head.  God forbid.  It’d be better for them to think I was walking the streets of Millburn the way I was because I thought shower caps were sexy.

Let me set the scene.  It was raining.  I had paid $50 to get my hair blown straight in monsoon-like conditions.  Where is your umbrella, Svetlana had asked.  The answer was three of them were happily dry in the trunk of my car.

I figured I’d be able to camouflage my one-step-up-from-a-Grandma-in-rollers look with the hood of my winter jacket. But when I went to pull my Amazon jacket from the coat rack, it wasn’t there.  Granted, it is a generic black jacket with multiple zippered pockets and a furry hood.  But I’ve had black jackets with hoods before.  They’ve never gone AWOL like this one has.  This is the second time in two months I’ve come back to a coat-rack to find my jacket gone. I looked around, and sure enough there was the imposter — the jacket that kind of resembled mine but really didn’t.  To be honest, I liked this one a little better; if it weren’t for the used tissues in the pockets and the car key I didn’t recognize, I might have kept it.  So now I didn’t have a hood I could use to go even somewhat incognito. No way was I heading out.  Sure, it was day two of Purim, and maybe in some land far, far away, it was okay to run around in a costume. Still in my shirtsleeves and my two-ply shower cap, I looked more like a bag lady than Queen Esther.

I went to the front to inform my friends at reception that my coat was gone.  Are you sure, they said.  Remember, given the plastic on my head, I was not terribly credible. I pulled out the key and put it on the counter.  “I don’t even know what kind of car this is,” I said.  Everyone stood there, unsure about what to do until Svetlana suggested I take off my shower caps.  As she pointed out, there was no point in wearing them if I wasn’t going anywhere. And incidentally neither was the person whose coat I had, considering I had her keys.

“She couldn’t have gotten far,” someone said. That was true.  The odd thing was my coat walked in a couple of minutes later on the body of a woman who was completely unaware she was wearing it.  “I just came back for my keys,” she said.  Apparently. We did the coat exchange.

At that point, I finally left the salon with my hood over my shower caps.  You’ll be happy to know my hair remained intact — even if little else did.