...watching others work. The crew boss at a car wash (the guy who handles the cash register) watches the crew swarm over the wet car with thick towels...

And there's nothing you can do about it...

This little fella snoozes, a laidback sentinel, above his pals the Marvel Heroes and the Glow Crosses...

All in a lather, my car inches through the wash cycle, barely recognizable...

At a car wash in Montclair....

Where cars come out clean...

Can only mean one thing--we're at the car wash...

With a break in the drizzly weather, I was overdue for a trip to the car wash. Then a funny thing happened...

At a newly renovated car wash in Verona, this tableau of American values...

Plain Sight's ten-photograph series on a trip through the car wash concludes with a lone figure waiting for her vehicle...

All good things come to an end, including the drag line at the car wash...

Having your car washed is an old-fashioned pleasure in at least two ways: it's a mechanical process (you can actually watch what's happening step-by-step, as opposed to the invisibility, the inscutability of digital), and it requires manual labor by human beings at the beginning and end of the process. For example, the initial drying...

I originally promised six Wash Cycle pictures, but hey, I seem to be on a roll, so it's on to bonus time.

In today's Plain Sight, midway through the tunnel of scrub at Palace Car Wash in Montclair, we encounter...the dancing sponges!

One of the pleasures of having your car washed is that the process has a distinct beginning, middle and end, like life itself. Watching your car inch through that tunnel of scrub, with its fulsome sprays and blinking lights, and emerge in the sunshine dripping as from a baptism, is to participate in a kind of secular born-again ritual.

Click to see whole picture...

Today we move from clothing to cars. First, the residue of brisk business paints the pavement.

On a sunny winter day you can see slush-spattered vehicles lining up halfway down the block to be vaccumed, hosed, blow-dried and buffed. No coins please. Leave a greenback in the old-fashioned mail box strategically placed within reach as you step out the exit and head toward your still-dripping mount.

On this Independence Day, as every day, the Stars and Stripes may turn up anywhere, even in nooks and crannies.

Maybe the water was too hot.