Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Grownup Child Actors

Q: What do you have against Gary Coleman?

A: We have nothing against Gary Coleman[...]we have the utmost respect and admiration for Gary. We love how he knows who he is and knows that people are taking pleasure in his downfall ("Schadenfreude"), and we love that he appears all over the place poking fun at himself and the pitiful downward slide of his acting career. Have you seen him on "The Simpsons"? On "Star Dates"? We love him.

We sort of idolize him too, in a way, because one of the most important themes in Avenue Q is that life isn't as easy as we've been led to believe. Our parents told us we were special; Mr. Rogers wanted to be our friend and neighbor; we thought we could grow up to be anything we wanted to be, from a fireman to President of the United States. Even in college, we thought we were pretty hot shit, ready to set the world on fire. But when we got out of college, we were faced with rent bills and temping and entry level jobs, if we were even lucky enough to get those. It wasn't nearly as easy or nice as we expected it was going to be. We found to our horror that we weren't all that special after all. And who better to symbolize the oh-so-special-as-a-kid/but-not-so-special-as-an-adult thing we all were faced with than Gary Coleman? He's practically the poster child -- we prefer to think of him as the patron saint -- of grown-up reality sucking. We looked around and found it really sucked to be us, and we knew that if our lives sucked, it must really suck to be Gary Coleman.