Top Shelf Essay Contest Winner!

Do you remember our Top Shelf Essay Contest? It works like so - write a 468 word essay telling us why you or somebody you know really, really deserves to have one of the shirts in the Top Shelf. (We appreciate and consider all corroborating evidence backing up your story, including scanned photos, ticket stubs, affidavits, certified documents, etc.)

If your essay convinces us that you've found it's rightful owner, we'll send you the shirt. In return, we ask for nothing more than a photo of the owner and the shirt - together at last, together forever.

Well, we've got a new winner! T.C. won the Wiz shirt with the following unorthodox entry:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Wiz T-shirt
A parody of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
(and not an essay)

I.
Among 322 hopeful vestments
The only worthy one
Was the brownie-hued Wiz t-shirt.

II.
I was of two arms
Like the Wiz t-shirt
Of which there are two armholes.

III.
The tag slept against my neck, soft, fraying
It was a small part of the t-shirt.

IV.
My jeans and my shoes
Are one.
My jeans and my shoes and the Wiz t-shirt
Are one.

V.
I do not know which to prefer,
A crackling logo under my fingertips
Or a thin poly-cotton blend at the slope of my shoulder,
The anticipation of this t-shirt
Or just after.

VI.
Fog crept across the cool of the mirror
With three dots of toothpaste.
The chubby off-white letters
Distorted as I tugged at my ponytail
My forearm hairs
Lifted in delight
This elusive garment draped across my chest.

VII.
Oh, skinny hipsters in cyberspace
Why do you imagine this garment on your frame?
Do you not see how it
Enjoys riding the curves
Of my 5'9", 150?

VIII.
I know woolen jodhpurs
And sumptuous, velveteen overcoats;
But I know, too,
That a cocoa Wiz t-shirt
Is involved in what I know.

IX.
When the Wiz t-shirt was won,
It marked the ending
Of a life scarred with disappointment.

X.
At the sight of the Wiz t-shirt
Bannered across my proud breast,
Even the mall-chain consumer moms
Would cry out in delight.

XI.
My pencil skittered across the paper
With a pensive amusement.
Once, a doubt clenched me
In that I mistook
My creative angle to the t-shirt essay contest
For pompous irreverence.

XII.
I am writing an arduous poem parody.
The t-shirt must be a desperate obsession.

XIII.
It was summer all winter.
It was temperate
And it was going to be temperate.
I shed my jacket
To expose my bare Wiz t-shirt.

--T.C.

Congrats T.C.! Everybody else, send those essays in!