alla breve III

It is nine o'clock at night, my cap and gown are long since returned to the university bookstore, but I have yet to take off my hood.

It's purple. It's heavy and velvet and purple with a maroon lining and then a black other lining or something. It's actually a fairly tangled mess of varicolored cloth, and nobody is quite sure how the thing is supposed to hang. During the hooding ceremony, Professor Equal Protection accidentally put mine on upside down, which wasn't much help as I tried to figure out how it was meant to drape. (The good Prof's own hood came from Harvard Law, which uses a unique model, so he's excused.) "No, it's supposed to go like this," advised Adam, arranging the (now properly-oriented) maroon lining to bouff out beneath the small of my back. "Are you sure?" my husband and stepmother wondered, opining that it had looked better when it hadn't resembled a Victorian bustle. Adam was fairly sure.

I didn't care. I thought the hood was one of niftiest pieces of clothing I'd ever worn, however it hung. By the end of the day (yes, I even wore it out to dinner over my dress and heels) I'd taken to calling it my Supercape. "We're with Batman," my father-in-law informed the restaurant hostess with a wink.

Ours is one of a handful of universities which deviate from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume standards (the U.C.C. of caps and gowns). Here, the J.D. gown is maroon with black velvet trim instead of the standard-issue black, and comes with an adorable octagonal velvet tam. I loved it. I loved it even when the sun came out and the temperature cracked ninety and R. and I agreed that we were going to die, right then. The tam alone was totally worth heatstroke.

But the school, ever a class act, had our backs. Each chair in the quad had a fresh bottle of water stowed beneath it. The basement of the large chapel where we queued up for the hooding ceremony featured giant ice tubs full of yet more bottled water. And the treats got even better as we took our seats upstairs in the pews. "Look! Goodie bags!" someone exclaimed. Sure enough, the law school had left each of us a school-logo-embossed bag of school-logo-embossed Fabulous Parting Gifts: a leatherbound copy of the Constitution, a pewter desktop business card holder, and a tin of Jelly Bellies.

The hoods were ours to keep as well. I decorated mine with tac pins: a little American flag, the crest of my debating Society, and even, over Adam's objections, the crest of my undergraduate college. Of course the hood needed power-ups to be a proper Supercape. As hot as it got, as long as the day was, as many times as I dozed off on the couch between the ceremony and dinner, I never once took it off. It probably could use a dry cleaning now. That's fine; there's time.

My regalia featured one more detail that no one else's did. Several years back, my stepmother had given me an old black-and-white photograph of my father in his twenties; it had served as my 1L moot court talisman, and when I transferred here, I promised myself I would carry it at graduation. "You can't do that," my father-in-law informed me. "It says on the website that you can't carry any personal items."

"Let them try and stop me," said I.

But nobody did. Dad hung out with all the J.D.s as we milled around the gymnasium, marched with us across the campus as we followed the bagpipe band (the bagpipe band!) to the quad, and sat with me during the speeches and giving of degrees. (He saved my seat while I went up on stage to claim the diploma, since I figured I'd need both hands.) He then tagged along to the chapel basement, politely declined a bottle of water, and accompanied me up through the high vaulted chamber to the pews and the chancel. And he got to take in the view outward from the stage while my upside-down Supercape was first bestowed upon me. I hope he liked it.

As it turned out, I had to give back not only my gown and beloved tam, but my diploma as well: the law school distributed graduation honors two days before commencement, which I guess didn't leave them enough time to feed our degrees back through the laser printer before handing them to us this morning. S'aright s'aright; it'll probably be a nice pick-me-up to get the thing in the mail a month from now, when I'm deep down in the Barbri dumps. And as bad as my multiple-choice error rate may get, I'll still have my Supercape in the closet should the need arise. Heck, I may wear it to the bar exam.

Which I'm not going to worry about, just yet.