You're going to kill me, but, the solution is simple.
To make a table and/or table cell with an image that you can write on top of, you only need to make one minor adjustment to the code we've ;p been practicing:

Instead of directly placing the image into the table cell, like this:

<td> <img src="mirror_2x1.jpg"> </td>

You set the image as the cell background, like this:

<td background="mirror_2x1.jpg" height="236">
<p> <font color="black"> You can see me! </font> </p> </td>

Which will produce this result:

You can see me!