Four bald women walk into a bar.

The bar is Sycamore, in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The mission is to sort out the many times we have been mistaken for one another. And to compare notes about what it is like to be a woman living with alopecia universalis in New York.

[Rep. Ayanna Pressley opens ups about living with alopecia and hair loss.]

Though I have never met my three doppelgängers, I know them, in a way. Ever since 2011, when, after 18 years of baldness, I stopped wearing scarves to cover my head, I have been approached by strangers who greet me warmly, asking about my dog or reminding me that we met at a party or assuring me that I was in their yoga class yesterday.

In 2012, the costume supervisor Megan Sanders, now 30, was on her way to a meeting in a building in Chelsea when the elevator operator greeted her as Rachel.

Megan already knew of Rachel (Fleit) from previous instances of mistaken identity. More than once she had been chased down the street by people yelling, “Rachel! Rachel!” Now she realized that she had stumbled on the place where Rachel worked (as the chief creative officer at the fashion label Honor). Twenty minutes later, the elevator operator interrupted Megan’s meeting to give her Rachel’s card.