It’s nice to have friends where ever you go. And especially nice to have Friends With You, Miami’s weirdo toymakers – I mean, art collective — greeting me in Toronto where I touched down last week for the Performance Studies International conference, which happened to coincide with the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity. I left town before the opening of FWY’s Wish Come True Festival remade Queen’s Park into something called Rainbow City, but not before receiving a FWY Weeble (I mean, We Wobble) during a visit to the Luminato artist’s lounge.

When I wasn’t playing with my rainbow toy, I was listening to lectures on performance and even giving my own lecture on what I consider the performance of policing and protest at global economic summits, like the G20 summit that’s coming up in Toronto after Luminato ends — and which some of you may remember played in our town back around the time of the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meeting in November, 2003.

I also saw a number of supposedly cutting edge performances that left me thinking Miami has nothing to envy our neighbors to the north. No wonder they’re inviting our artists to take over their cities.