One of the people in the photograph at right is among the most flamboyant performers in America. The other is a singer.

The picture showed up in the winter issue of the Fieger Times, the official semi-regular newsletter of Fieger, Fieger, Kenney & Johnson. Two people on the mailing list immediately forwarded it to me in hopes I’d call Geoffrey Fieger and ask the question on everyone’s lips:

C’mon. Is that really Michael Jackson?

Yes, Fieger says. And the guy has huge hands.

They met six years ago, when Michigan’s best-known attorney took a break from his busy schedule to run for governor and spend a few months saying inappropriate but occasionally riotous things about John Engler.

Fieger resurrected the photo this month because people — among them Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, on the air with “On the Record” — keep asking him about Jackson’s legal problems. Fieger has not spoken to Jackson about his defense, but he does have insight into important things such as the entertainer’s undershirt.

“He wore a heck of a lot of makeup,” says Fieger, who’s in Cleveland preparing for a trial. “It got all over his shirt collar.”

To Fieger’s perceptive eye, it seemed like far too much goo to apply regularly. “You couldn’t take a shower every day. You’d spend the rest of your life doing your makeup.” And in support of that hypothesis, he enters into evidence Jackson’s white undergarment.

“I could tell,” he says, “this was not a fresh T-shirt.”

Again, I should point out that their meeting was in 1998. But it’s not like Jackson has become any less peculiar since then, and as soon as Martha Stewart’s trial is over, he’ll be reclaiming his spot atop the celebrity defendant list. So I asked Fieger to tell me more.

He says they were introduced by former Detroit cable TV mogul Don Barden, who wanted one of the three local casino licenses and trotted out Jackson to help him get it. They unveiled an improbable plan that included a theme park and, if memory serves, a team of magic elves spreading rose petals through the streets of the city.

Barden was ultimately rejected, but that’s all water under the Zug Island bridge and has nothing to do with Fieger’s impressions of Jackson.

They spent an hour together, he says, and Jackson struck him as “a bright guy. He was there for quite a complex business deal, and I got the impression he understood the ins and outs of the proposal he was making.”

You don’t see that side of Jackson when he’s explaining why it’s OK to share his bed with small boys. Nor do you realize, Fieger says, that he’s not as waif-like as his slender frame and soft voice make him appear on television.

“He’s a much bigger guy than you’d imagine, every bit of 6 feet tall. The other thing you don’t get is that he’s a man — a 45-year-old man with a man’s beard.”

And a man’s hands. A very large man’s. “Next to Dennis Rodman’s,” Fieger says, “they’re the most disproportionately large hands I’ve come across.”

As for where those hands are alleged to have wandered, Fieger says it weakens the prosecutors’ case considerably when the chief witness is on record saying nice things about the man he’s now accusing.

Then again, he says, Santa Barbara, Calif., is a highly conservative locale, and Jackson’s televised interviews haven’t done much for his image. Plus — putting himself in the jury’s position — there’s this observation, gained from Fieger’s close-up view and based on a more personal experience with Jackson than most others will ever have:

“When you get down to it, he looks strange.”

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