{"id":23,"date":"1999-11-22T08:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-22T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laaker.com\/cms\/?p=23"},"modified":"2007-11-13T22:10:51","modified_gmt":"2007-11-14T06:10:51","slug":"an-evening-in-the-company-of-a-mister-gary-coleman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/press-releases\/1999\/an-evening-in-the-company-of-a-mister-gary-coleman","title":{"rendered":"An Evening in the Company of a Mister Gary Coleman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"prbodycopy\">(New York) &#8211; Micah Laaker spent much of yesterday in the company of actor Gary Coleman, helping fellow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.treehater.com\/\">Anti-Arboreal Association<\/a> member Paul Chan conduct an interview for &#8216;Good Lookin&#8217; magazine. On a nationwide tour to promote his current Web endeavour, <a href=\"http:\/\/webathon.ugo.com\">The Gary Coleman Webathon<\/a>, Mr. Coleman talked extensively, and excitedly, about UGO&#8217;s (his sponsor) quick turnaround, clever concept, and entertaining offerings. Obviously not a huge fan of the Internet (This gathered from comments such as &#8220;The Internet is destroying society,&#8221; &#8220;The Internet is the downfall of human interaction,&#8221; and &#8220;You&#8217;d have to be a moron to give out any personal information on the Web! You might as well walk up and give someone your wallet, credit cards and Social Security number!&#8221;), Mr. Coleman had nothing but kind words for his sponsor&#8217;s site and his upcoming content. Fortunately for Mr. Coleman&#8217;s credibility, his statements concerning his site&#8217;s prowess did not seem forced, and thus contradictory.<\/p>\n<p class=\"prbodycopy\">Still a man of the people, Mr. Coleman helped hail a cab for dinner transportation by &#8220;encouraging&#8221; two police officers to assist in the ever difficult matter. This encouraging took the form of reminders of contemporary Danny Glover&#8217;s New York taxi drivers&#8217; racial discrimination lawsuit. After posing for photographs with &#8220;Gary,&#8221; the officers quickly remedied the situation, and the trio sped towards their dining destination, Manhattan&#8217;s &#8216;City Crab.&#8217; Before leaving, however, Mr. Coleman bonded with Mr. Laaker is his disdain for Sprint PCS service, explaining that the PCS acronym represented &#8220;Pure Call Sucking.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"prbodycopy\">After what was to be a foretaste of the rest of the evening, Mr. Coleman smooth-talked the hostess into quick service, and was soon &#8220;spitting game&#8221; (as Mr. Laaker termed it) to the waitress. Not trying to appear disrespectful, Mr. Laaker soon found himself briefly at the neighboring table to give a &#8220;pound&#8221; to Chicago hip-hop icon <a href=\"http:\/\/www.com-mon.com\">Common<\/a> who was also in town eating at &#8220;The Crab.&#8221; Conversation quickly turned back to Mr. Coleman&#8217;s current (radio deejay) and future projects (secretive, non-acting plans), as well as his preferences in video games (&#8220;I&#8217;m for any game that let&#8217;s you blow the human body into a million pieces,&#8221; and &#8220;God, I&#8217;m so sick of polygons; I CAN&#8217;T TAKE ANYMORE POLYGONS!&#8221;) and disdain for monopolies such as Microsoft (&#8220;I can&#8217;t wait for Microsoft to be broken into tiny little chunks!&#8221;). Despite seeming quite hostile and angry as such quotes would seem, Mr. Coleman was noted to be &#8220;a very likeable guy,&#8221; and joked around with Mr. Laaker and Mr. Chan like they were Kimberly and Willis. Not halfway through dinner, another celebrity, the well-remembered Freddy &#8220;Boom Boom&#8221; Washington, Mr. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, of &#8220;Welcome Back Kotter&#8221; fame, came up for a quick hello.<\/p>\n<p class=\"prbodycopy\">Whenever conversation found itself lagging, Mr. Laaker was noted to repeatedly press the idea of Mr. Coleman using the name &#8220;The Hot Boys&#8221; for his upcoming project, in reverance of fellow child entertainers, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peeps.com\/hotboys\/\">The Hot Boys<\/a>. Mr. Coleman oddly never showed interest in this name, and invariably turned to another topic. When the issue of video games was resurrected a third time, Mr. Chan suggested a trip to Times Square to play &#8216;Time Crisis II,&#8217; a first person &#8220;shooter,&#8221; to pit the three against each other. Matters took a turn for the worse, however, when the children from a hosted birthday party there swarmed Mr. Coleman for autographs. Contrary to past &#8220;alleged&#8221; assaults, Mr. Coleman happily took photographs and signed his name to all enquiring inidividuals. Mr. Laaker reported that &#8220;all enquiring individuals&#8221; probably numbered 40 in the five hours the three had together.<\/p>\n<p class=\"prbodycopy\">After an exhausting run of Time Crisis II, the group decided to disband for the evening, and each went their separate ways; Mr. Laaker&#8217;s way being noticeably longer than the rest, as his involved backtracking due to his accidental leaving of his bag at Mr. Coleman&#8217;s apartment. Before parting, the three talked of plan&#8217;s to raid certain companies in the future to get their hands on high-tech development machines for Mr. Coleman&#8217;s upcoming projects, although no exact dates were set.<\/p>\n<p class=\"prbodycopy\">As a side note, to avoid being labeled a &#8220;moron,&#8221; Mr. Laaker would like all readers to ignore any and all personal information about himself that they may find on his site.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mlaaker\/304027205\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/99\/304027205_70866302aa_o.jpg\" width=\"175\" height=\"131\" alt=\"Gary in Bib\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"prcaption\">Mr. Coleman, in bib, at City Crab.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mlaaker\/304027200\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/117\/304027200_ebecca21ab_o.jpg\" width=\"175\" height=\"131\" alt=\"Gary and Micah\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"prcaption\">Mr. Coleman and Mr. Laaker playing Time Crisis II.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mlaaker\/304027258\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/100\/304027258_788ec76754_o.jpg\" width=\"175\" height=\"132\" alt=\"shooting.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"prcaption\">Mr. Coleman and Mr. Chan playing Time Crisis II.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(New York) &#8211; Micah Laaker spent much of yesterday in the company of actor Gary Coleman, helping fellow Anti-Arboreal Association member Paul Chan conduct an interview for &#8216;Good Lookin&#8217; magazine. On a nationwide tour to promote his current Web endeavour, The Gary Coleman Webathon, Mr. Coleman talked extensively, and excitedly, about UGO&#8217;s (his sponsor) quick [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[72,83,71,84],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-releases","tag-celebrities","tag-gary-coleman","tag-sightings","tag-ugo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}