My friend Sara Miles, whose wonderful book about her religious conversion and subsequent vocation to feed people, Take This Bread, has brought her into contact with a lot of interesting people both powerful and powerless, had yesterday to take the Anglican Archbishop of El Salvador around town. And she wanted to borrow my car to do it in.

Naturally I took the car, a nice sedan with 130,000 miles on it, to get cleaned at the big car wash on 16th and SVN. (That was also the day I discovered Bar Bambino, which I posted about the other day.) And I discovered an unexpected side effect of getting the extra-special pull-out-all-the-stops wash-wax-and-detail job: it renders the car invisible.

The next day, several hours after I had dropped the car off with Sara, I got a call on my cell phone. “Mark! What color is your car?? Is it blue?” No, I said, it was black. “Well, geez, I can’t find it — wait… you said it was blue?”
No, black! Black! “Okay… I guess I’ll find it.” Later that day she told me the story of how she walked up and down the block in front of her church, the the archbishop holding his crosier, until they found the car.

Then today I parked near Duboce Park to go to an event, and damned if I couldn’t find the car when I went to look for it. It took me like ten minutes.

So perhaps you’re having trouble with your car getting broken into, or maybe you just are tired of circling the block and want to park in sort of half-way in that bus zone. The solution? The $75 wash-wax-and-the-works job at the 16th and South Van Ness car wash. Guaranteed to make your car invisible.

PS — the car wash itself is also invisible — at least on Flickr. Couldn’t find a single picture of it.