PAULA NEAL MOONEY

by Paula Neal Mooney I woke up thinking about Bill Maher . Perhaps this is because just a few hours before I went to bed, I was arguing with 51-year-old Bill Maher . Calm down, people. I'm not his latest piece of carmel arm candy. Bill Maher was once again pontificating on his new season of Real Time With Bill Maher this weekend. "I think all religions are crazy," said Maher, dogging out Mormons whilst encircling both his ears with his pointers. "That's a religion!" I argued back. "Believing in nothing is its own religion!" My hubby bristled while I ranted quietly, "This is exactly what Ann Coulter writes about in Godless: The Church of Liberalism !" (Ann Coulter, by the way, recently gave a suprising blurb to liberal writer and genius Michael Eric Dyson for his new Debating Race book. Maybe she's trying to quell the whole Kwanzaa mess . Maybe I am, too.) But back to Bill Maher. Like Prince sang, "I -- how you say? -- I wonder ...

by Paula Neal Mooney Again I was catching up with my TiVo'd shows whilst putting teeny-tiny microbraids in my hair and was caught by surprise when The View interviewed Grey's Anatomy hottie Justin Chambers, and they flashed a picture of his wife, Keisha, on the screen. Is she black? I asked myself, cause no one else was asking. Sure I knew all about Justin Chambers and his five kids, but I naturally assumed his wife would be a beautiful blonde named Becky or something, not a beautiful black woman named Keisha Chambers . Justin Chambers has a black wife . Wow. There, I said it. Or wrote it, actually. I wrote the thing that many folks are skirting around on the message boards and avoiding writing. They seem to be avoiding a mention of the interracial factor like the black plague. (Yes, I'm trying to work the words "Justin Chambers" and "black wife" into this post as many times as editorially possible.) "She's not what I expected," is t...

...when he sat behind me on the "el" train as we rode in the middle of the Dan Ryan Expressway towards the end of the line at 95th and State streets. I was in my early 20s, had graduated from Florida A & M University and returned home to Chicago to take whatever job I could get. Back then, in a city like Chi-town, every Tom, Dick and Harry would accost me on the street saying all kinds of weird stuff, so I have to admit I played the brotha off big time when he began chatting me up. Puts me in mind of an LL Cool J song: I tell you "Come here," you say "Meet me half way" 'Cause brothers been poppin' that yang all day Back then brothers were "poppin' that yang all day" long, so when this one began to tell me about his travels to London with Arthur Andersen, I wondered how long it would be till he asked for my phone number. "You should go to London some day," he said. "It's a really cool place for black people....