Birthday gift for teen girl

I'm hungry when I meet Gabrielle Union. Famished. The actress invites me--exactly 8.2 days into my Cabbage Soup Diet--for dinner in her trailer near the set of the movie she's filming in New York: Paramount's version of the classic fifties sitcom The Honeymooners, which hits theaters this summer. "I'm not so hungry," I fib. One saliva-inducing scent of collard greens later, Gabrielle and I balance yam-soaked paper plates on our knees while talking hair weaves (hers), Black men (the shortage), TV (the show she can't miss), even body drama (her secret wish).

The day we meet is Gabrielle's birthday. Exactly 32 years ago, she rolled into the world as the second eldest daughter of three. Her dad (then a high-school basketball coach) and her mom (then a phone-company employee) moved the family to Pleasanton, California, when Gabrielle was 8. There she competed in nearly every school sport, earned the kind of grades that would make any parent do the hallelujah dance, and fantasized about becoming an attorney. But providence would rule otherwise. With a sociology degree from UCLA in her Levi's pocket, she interned at a modeling agency and was repeatedly mistaken for a Tyra type. Faster than you could spell Tinseltown, she'd eked out a modeling, 15/and movie career, playing chutzpah-filled heroines (who can forget that formidable cheerleader in 2000's Bring It On?). After a string of roles as the bratty friend in teen flicks (think 10 Things I Hate About You), Gabrielle began grabbing roles opposite the kind of Black men I only dream of necking with in a dark room.

Like Morris Chestnut. Gabrielle paired up with him first in The Brothers in 2001, then in Two Can Play That Game later that year. In 2003 she played rapper LL Cool J's nemesis-turned-lover in Deliver Us From Eva. Last summer she starred with Jamie Foxx in the romantic comedy Breakin' All the Rules. And with all the time she clearly doesn't have between flicks, she even squeezed in a stint as DMX's babe in 2003's Cradle 2 the Grave before teaming up with Will Smith for Bad Boys II. On the small screen, Gabrielle had a recurring role as an inner-city doctor on the series City of Angels. Then in 2001 she became the first African-American love interest on an episode of Friends.

The week before I meet with Gabrielle in New York, she had been in Dublin filming scenes for her part as the stern-but-nurturing Alice in The Honeymooners. That's when Carol Woods, the woman who plays Gabrielle's mom in the movie, overheard a clue to the perfect birthday gift for her friend. "While I was eating chips in Ireland, I said, 'Oooh, I want some soul food!' "Gabrielle explains between forkfuls of mac and cheese. So come her birthday (October 29), Woods hauled out her pots, dredged up her inner Mississippi, and presented a feast for the entire film crew. Among those in the food line: Cedric the Entertainer, the actor-comedian who plays the garrulous and lovable Ralph, hubby to Gabrielle's Alice.

Daring a remake of a series as revered as The Honeymooners takes nerve. Meet David Friendly--the producer who brought us hits like Big Momma's House and Dr. Dolittle. "I always wanted to make a movie out of The Honeymooners because it was my favorite television show ever," he tells me.

Friendly's take on the legendary comedy will be a loosely rendered interpretation. "It captures the spirit of the original Honeymooners," he says, "but we had to contemporize it for an audience that may not have grown up on the series." In the series, characters Ralph and Alice Kramden (Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows) squeezed humor from a hardscrabble existence in a spartan Brooklyn tenement, also home to the Nortons (Art Carney as Ed, Joyce Randolph as Trixie). In the movie the setting won't change, and neither will Ralph's job as a bus driver But the details of Ralph's get-rich-quick schemes come in an entirely new flavor The update has Ralph squandering his family's savings on a brass train buried beneath Grand Central and an abandoned greyhound dog he plans to turn into a Seabiscuit. While the Gabrielle-Cedric combo alone would make for a noteworthy opening weekend, the rest of the cast is just as stellar: Mike Epps plays Ed, Regina Hall portrays Trixie, and Eric Stoltz is a villain trying to steal a house that Alice wins.

SHE'S EVERY WOMAN

"I went out last night and woke up with my ankles swollen," Union tells me over our buckling plates. "I can't do it like I did when I was younger--stay out all night and then pop up the next day. This morning I felt every bit my age." She doesn't look it. Thanks to God's party favor to Black people (melanin), the right amount of junk in her trunk (if ogling male passersby is a litmus test), and a metabolism that's on her team ("I hate exercise!" she says of the Pilates-and-cardio boot camp she survived when prepping for Bad Boys II), Gabrielle has the satiny complexion and the brick-house build of a woman who could draw envious glances from the less well-endowed. Which is why I find it curious--and refreshing that the sisters I chatted with before my interview hailed Union as an Everywoman, the kind of pal you might cackle with over red Kool-Aid. Given a towering five-foot-eight inches presence that screams, "I'm here!" and oooh yes, that grin she has worn since age 14 when braces corrected a row of buck teeth, why don't the jagged-tooth ectomorphs of the world rise up in revolt?

Because you gotta love a woman who shops at Target ("It's a sickness!" she tells me). Because any chick who reveals her weave brand--"Extensions Plus is pricey, but, girl, you get what you pay for"--and watches American Idol ("I voted for Fantasia 17 times!") earns the automatic sister nod. In fact, you recognize her as the kind of friend who might stick around for a girls-only gabfest late into the night. She's you.

How one can maintain any sense of journalistic decorum while inhaling honey-glazed ham, I don't know. So I tuck away the 47 questions I've arrived with and let the conversation's current carry us. First to Gabrielle's years as a Black child in a very White town near San Francisco called Pleasanton. Next, to an incident in a shoe store that changed everything for her. Then to her marriage to former Jacksonville Jaguars football player Chris Howard and her promise to herself about a scene she'll never play in.

Gabrielle was born in Omaha, and even after her parents moved near San Fran, she visited every summer--it's home base for her mom's side of the family, the Bryant-Fishers. For her earliest childhood experiences, the midwestern town was the backdrop. "When Gabrielle was little," her mother, Theresa Glass Union, recalls later, "I used to rock her to sleep. And she was the kind of child who didn't mind hugs and kisses." In later years Mom and daughters shared another memory: prancing around the house to the Dreamgirls sound track. "I've always loved Dreamgirls, so I would have my girls line up and sing as if they were onstage. You have to find the fun," says Theresa.

By Gabrielle's senior year in high school she'd become a pseudo Dreamgirl-turned-stage stealer. Her longtime chum Ray Martinez, now a 32-year-old dancer in Los Angeles, tells it this way: "For a talent show, Gabrielle asked me to choreograph a performance for her and her friends. "They did a lip sync to that En Vogue song 'Don't Go,' and Gabrielle was the lead. She got down on that floor and channeled En Vogue. The crowd went crazy." "Don't Go" took first place.

Losing would've been the anomaly. "Even when she was small, she had to be the winner," Mom says. "It's part of her character to try to be the best." In school her name was a fixture on the dean's list.

But stellar grades and a killer basketball shot don't exempt you from the racial-identity stuff. Pleasanton is no Atlanta--which is to say that Gabrielle joined the 1.2 other teens in her area who were familiar with a relaxer kit. "I wasn't a cute child, and I just hated having my hair done," she says. "Later I went through that process of believing that if I left the Hawaiian Silky on my hair long enough, it would change my whole look. All I got were burns and lesions!"

That was all circa BJ: Before Janet. "Remember her Black Cat video? I don't know why her haircut in that video worked for my hair, but it did. Everyone thought Janet was so pretty, and because she was close to my complexion, I thought I had a chance. That's when I started getting a little more loving from the opposite sex."