Michael Moore, come get your shirts.

I met Michael Moore in the lobby of Comedy Central this past Valentine's day where I was attending a taping of the Daily Show. Next to Stephen Colbert, Jon's the most brilliant man in America. I refuse to engage in the John/Paul who's hipper conversation. It's apples and oranges and I love 'em both.

Both the Daily Show and The Colbert Report are brilliant satire, demanding an informed and impassioned audience. Blue Collar Comedy Tour this is not. Fake news has faux news running scared. I told Howard Dean last spring that satire will save us. I'd just read Art Spiegelman's article in Harpers entitled "Drawing Blood," in which he published and rated the infamous Danish cartoons by effectiveness and likelihood that they would bring death to any of the poor cartoonists in hiding.

For years I've been telling anyone who would listen that satire is a weapon of truth and a slayer of truthiness.™ From Ancient Rome to Daumier to Thomas Nast to Will Rodgers to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, satire will expose the emperors' new wardrobes and clarity will win in the end.

Michael Moore is a very, very tall man. He's not as wide as he might appear to be on television. Either that or he's lost a lot of weight. He had to duck to make it under the bargain basement metal detector. I looked at him with the shock of recognition one has upon spotting any celebrity and consulted no fewer than four people around me to be sure that it was he.

I nervously approached him and showed him a Progresswear brochure which he carefully read, laughing more than once. At that moment I realized that if I could make Michael Moore laugh I must be doing something right. He said he loved the slogans and thought they were beautifully designed and happily signed the cover. I said "I'd like to send you some shirts." He said "why don't you just give me some?" I paused, trying to discern what he thought I'd said. “Did you think I said that I'd like to sell you some shirts?" Apparently he did. I laughed and clarified that I'd send a truckload for his entire crew if he'd just let me know where to deliver them. I was so nervous that I didn't think to give him the brochures I’d frantically printed to give to Adam Chodikoff, the Daily Show producer who generously provided our VIP seats. Instead I gave Michael a very corporate looking business card that I'm sure he promptly lost. He told me his crew was in New York working on his latest project and they’d had an especially rough day. He was treating them to a night on the town which commenced with VIP seats at the show.

It was a solid Daily Show that night. Jon seemed truly flattered that Michael and his crew had shown up and introduced him before the show. I sat facing him trying to discern what size t-shirts to order for him. In the blink of an eye the show was over, the elated crowd reluctantly making their exodus to the New Radicals' "You Get What You Give."

Michael Moore's face shows up on a few other t-shirt companies' sites, photographed with the gleeful entrepreneur at his side, knowing that this single picture will garner them sales. So I'm hoping he might be a good sport given that his exact words were "I like these. I REALLY like these." Sending him the shirts isn't an option. I need that photo. Please, Michael. Help out a fellow Midwesterner.

A friend gave me a contact at Michael's production studio, whom I called. A young man answered who wasn't too interested in yet another t-shirt vendor trying to put some XLT shirts on the sizable torso of our nation's greatest political documentarian cum billboard. He politely but firmly said "just send me an e-mail with the info, ok?" He gave me an address that got kicked back.

I’ve been working up the courage to call again. Mike, let me know where to send those shirts. If you could humor us by sitting for our photographer Tony Ward, we'd be all the more indebted.