their eyes were watching
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A Recovering Magazine Junkie
ABOUT Meera Bowman-Johnson I’m a wife, mother, writer and designer who’s lived, worked and played in Philly, Atlanta, NY, LA and currently Houston, TX. My love affair with magazines began as a five year old, when my grandfather gave me subscriptions to Young Miss and Seventeen. He wasn’t trying to encourage me to grow up too soon,…
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Can a Reality Show Change Mike Vick's Image?
In April there were rumors stirring around that Michael Vick was shopping around for a reality television gig while he was in prison. The rumors came as no surprise, at the time Vick was no longer in the NFL and he was flat out broke in prison. Why wouldn’t he want to negotiate a deal that…
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Too Much Mo'Nique
I’m no TV show host. And I’m not an expert on public speaking by a long shot. But I watch too much TV to know what’s good and what’s bad. Mo’Nique’s show isn’t terrible. (Hey, it was only the first episode.) She engages with her guests and is a likeable host. Last night, she sat…
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D.C. Latinos Share Culture With City
For the past 35 years the Latino community in Washington,D.C. has been coming together for their annual Fiesta D.C. Last Sunday, I found myself in the midst of it all. Hundreds of people from Columbia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico and any spanish speaking country you can think of filled Mt.Pleasant street. There were three…
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A New Kind of Video Girl
ABOUT Eboni Farmer I’m a senior at Howard University and I am so ready to the graduate. I don’t own a television so I don’t watch it too often. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t have a television in my room growing up. My brother and I…
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Ebony Ain't What it Used to Be?
Jody Watley, yes, that Jody Watley (although it isn’t a verified Twitter account), recently tweeted about the potential sale of Ebony by Johnson Publications. She typed: Thinking Ebony/Jet never really changed with the times & Essence really needs a wider net for its cover subjects, same faces ovr&ovr Here’s my two cents regarding Ms. Watley’s…
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How Kandi Burruss Keeps It Real
Bravo nearly let me down. Watching the first few minutes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta — my consistent Thursday night “reality” fix, I didn’t get that good ol’ voyeur feeling; that juicy shame that comes from checking in with the over-dramatic, (allegedly) wealthy black women featured in the current season of Housewives. Castmates NeNe…
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Oprah in a "Mad Men" World
When I heard the other day that Oprah has a 1960s-themed show today, in celebration of Mad Men my first impulse was to go out and “madmenize” her. Off I went to the intensely addictive Mad Men Yourself. Go try it yourself, it’s an interesting experiment. Mad Men is extremely appealing to me from the…
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Clair Huxtable & Me
I will never forget Thursday nights at Washington & Lee University law school in Lexington, Va., in the fall of 1991-spring 1992. Laura, Ronda, Charlene and I would all gather at Laura’s apartment and watch The Cosby Show and A Different World. We blocked out this time religiously so that we could have a study and…
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Black Folks Behaving Badly
It used to be that black folks as a people did not behave badly in public. You all know what I mean. You have been in the grocery store and watched in shock as children of another “hue” lay on the floor, acted out, and talked back to their parents. It used to be that we…