YYG-YYZ-YYG: Dancing Into Toronto

I’m on the tail end of a 12-hour trip to Toronto, a day squeaked out of a busy week to let me spend some time with my clients Bill and Laurence, they of Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie.

We spent the day at 304 Parliament Street, formerly the Salvation Army Citadel and now in the process of being transformed into a palace of dance.

When I arrived just after 10 a.m., Bill’s brother Paddy and his crew were halfway through the conversion of the old sloped theatre floor into a sprung dance floor; when I left at 8:00 p.m. the sub-floor was in and a prototype of the bounciness juice was in place.

Laurence and Bill have jumped into a daring project, a project they’ve been keeping alive almost entirely through sheer force of will; it was equally enthralling and exhausting to spend the day with them.

In there somewhere I spent 15 minutes on the phone with Bangalore trying to get Bell DSL installed, only to give up and try it myself. Which worked. Then I dashed out and bought a wifi access point at Staples and returned to find a sweet spot of telephone jack, power, and avoidance of construction debris to connect wifi and DSL. Which partially worked (there is a DSL router in the middle of their kitchen floor for the time being).

We also picked up Jimmy and Juliet from school, shared a slice of pizza and a Brio for lunch and a family dinner of Greek salad for dinner, and concocted grand plans for colemanlemieux.com. And had another round of lofty discussions about best practices for running a dance company with no staff and endless ideas.

It was fun, pointless, and practical all. And proof, perhaps, that however powerful our e-networking tools are, sometimes it’s important to pop in for a visit to get a real sense of what’s going on.