You’ll be seeing a lot mo’ of Mo’Nique
It was a straight-up skinny-girl move for Mo’Nique to pass up a real woman’s breakfast (pancakes! omelets! sausage!) in favor of a cup of Earl Grey tea with honey.
But it would take more than turning down breakfast for the former star of UPN’s “The Parkers,” a Queen of Comedy and creator of the Oxygen network beauty pageant “Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. (Fabulous and Thick) Chance” to get pushed off the “fluffy girls” bandwagon.
It was Mo’Nique, after all, who caused even bootylicious Beyonce to bow down to bigness by stealing the show – and the diva’s moves – at the 2005 BET Awards. Wearing a cleavage-baring minidress and stilettos, assisted by a posse of similarly thick dancers, she opened with a rump-shaking rendition of “Crazy in Love.”
In her new movie comedy, “Phat Girlz,” Mo’Nique plays an aspiring plus-size fashion designer who struggles to find acceptance.
She was so busy talking it up, she didn’t have time to order breakfast. She’ll have plenty of time for dinner, though.
“Bay-bee,” she coos, sucking up the word like it was a long string of spaghetti, “I love meat. So I’m gonna have me a smothered steak with mushrooms and onions, a chicken Caesar salad with dressing, and a piece of apple pie. … I love food. It tastes good when I swallow.
“The word ‘fat,’ they make it to be such an ugly word,” she continues. “I dig my double chins. I like my stomachs and my fat arms, my fat back. … You have to love yourself!”
There’s a lot of her to love. The 38-year-old comic is a shapely size 20, having dropped the excess weight she put on while pregnant with her 5-month-old twins, David and Jonathan.
Her body rebounded from the pregnancy pounds, she says, because she was already fit, thanks to walking four to five miles a day.
Growing up in Baltimore, the youngest of four children, Mo’Nique “was always prissy, always outspoken, always wanted to be seen,” says her brother and manager, Steve Imes.
Being fat has always been part of her stand-up, ever since 1989, when Imes dared Mo’Nique to perform at a local club after he bombed a week earlier. “She brought the house down,” he says.
She spent the next six years working as a customer service agent by day and doing stand-up at night. She and Imes eventually bought a club and named it Mo’Nique’s Comedy House.
In 1999, she got the offer for “The Parkers,” a spin-off of the ‘90s sitcom “Moesha.”
Thousands of women bought her 2003 New York Times best-seller, “Skinny Women Are Evil: Notes of a Big Girl in a Small-Minded World.”
Her message for former F.A.T. girl Star Jones: “C’mon back, baby. We miss you. You put that Snickers in your purse and come on back home!”
The birthday bunch
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is 80. Naturalist Jim Fowler (“Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”) is 74. Actress Michael Learned (“The Waltons”) is 67. Actor Dennis Quaid is 52. Actress-model Paulina Porizkova is 41. Actress Cynthia Nixon (“Sex and the City”) is 40. Actress Keshia Knight Pulliam (“The Cosby Show”) is 27. Singer-actor Jesse McCartney (“Summerland”) is 19. Actress Kristen Stewart (“Panic Room”) is 16.