Android :: Set Solid Background To Spawned Activity

I'm not very familiar with the android SDK yet. I have an application (game), which is developed mainly using the NDK, and uses egl to render. i have an activity which handles the egl swapbuffer and runs the games native main loop, pretty straight forward I guess.

Now I have made another activity which host a TableLayout containing an EditText as well as a button (simply for text-input later used by the game). I spawn this activity from my main activity using startActivityForResult. The small problem I'm having now is that I can't manage to make this "popup" activity to have a background, so my paused game will reside in the background, with the various widgets just overlaid. This is not very pretty in my opinion, and I would like to at least have a solid background color for my spawned activity while it's active. I *could* just simply go into some state in the games main loop which clears the gl-screen just before I spawn the new activity. But I don't like this solution and it's a tad more work then I'm prepared to put in just at this time in the project. I'm pretty sure there is some simple way to just set a background color somehow, I just can't find *any* way to do it, I've looked around in the SDK resources and tried to search for any hints towards this, but i'm just not familiar enough with the java SDK to find what i'm looking for.

On a side note I would also like to be able to center the EditText widget as well as the button on the screen once the Activity is active, I haven't looked very deeply into it yet, but from a quick glance of the documentation I couldn't really find any suitable positioning methods in the tablelayout class. But as I said, haven't looked very hard. Can probably solve that one easy, but i'm just throwing this in as well :)