Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong's pinstripe suit clashes with the fairyland on the wallpaper behind him, and the couch he's sitting on is flowered in the same pattern as a bedspread my mother bought in the '80s.

Working a suburban ward lined with strip malls, there are just a few choice places to be a "man of the people," and the Valley Fields Family Restaurant is one of them. We met last week, and as the Councillor sipped ice tea and waited for his large plate of fries, he smiled and told me that he just got tickets to the TIFF premiere of The Men Who Stare at Goats and would thus need to duck out in about half an hour.

The right-wing Councillor for Don Valley East was first elected in 1994. He moved into the neighbourhood when he was 8-years-old, after his parents bought a three-bedroom bungalow, their first house. We chat and easily finish the interview in 20 minutes, and then his girlfriend pops in wearing a black sequined outfit before they step into a silver convertible and head for the red carpet.

Matthew Corrin is a risk taker. He may not seem like one during our recent lunch over a bowl of salad at Freshii, his highly successful (and healthy) quick service restaurant chain, but how else to explain someone who takes a well known and established business called Lettuce Eatery and changes its name overnight?

The move was bold, if not highly controversial. The official impetus for the name change starts with the chain's expansion to Chicago in 2008. Corrin wanted to evolve the menu to include other popular (and higher margin) offerings like rice bowls, breakfast and burritos. But with a name like Lettuce Eatery customers would always think of salad first. So he changed the name for the US market where he expects to have hundreds of franchises within the decade.

But therein lied the problem. Once the new name was in place in the US, it was highly inefficient to have a separate brand (but same product offerings) in Toronto so he decided to change the name here too, keeping his fingers crossed that the chain's throngs of loyal customers wouldn't mind. So far, it doesn't seem to have backfired.

Jan Wong is off the meds -- but she's still in therapy for depression. It hit a few years ago, she tells me as we stroll to a quiet location to talk, and when it did it took her by complete surprise. "So what do I do? I write about it."

Trying to write a memoir about depression when you're depressed is, well, downright depressing, but for Wong, who just submitted her manuscript to the publisher, putting fingers to a keyboard is the only thing to do.

Wong's books revolve around her own experiences -- in Beijing Confidential, she writes about the guilt she felt later in life, remembering how as a diehard Maoist she turned in a fellow university student who requested help to flee to America in the middle of the Cultural Revolution -- and in Red China Blues, how her idealism turned to hardened realism as she chronicled corruption and tragedies like the Tiananmen Square massacre as the Globe & Mail's Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994.

Steve Munro is a transit geek with an edge. His Santa Claus beard and twinkling eyes signal natural warmth, but the click of his badass leather motorcycle boots as we walked through his neighbourhood around Broadview and Danforth reminded me that this guy does more than just salivate over streetcars.

An intricate shaded tattoo of a grapevine starts on his right foot winding all the way up the side of his body and down his arm. On his back a tree grows up his spine and across his shoulders. He got the tattoos in his fifties because he loved the artist, Daemon Rowanchilde, and chose them partly because they're symbols of inherent strength without the nasty aggression.

A proud trainspotter, Munro's been riding the rocket for kicks since he was a kid. He parlayed that love into a life of transit activism, crafting a reputation at City Hall for his reasoned ideas and ability to recall any streetcar on the line. It also makes him Yoda to up-and-coming urban planners and transit fans in the city, penning columns for Spacing Magazine and getting phone calls from reporters and city planners hours after publishing his latest blog post.

I met Leah Miller at what her publicist said would be a "fun, promo event" for the new season of Miller's show, So You Think You Can Dance Canada. And if a "fun promo event" is a couple of girls handing out squished up SYTYCD beach balls, a few hip hop and break dancers occasionally busting a move in an eight by six foot taped-off rectangle, and the show's hosts milling around smiling and signing autographs - then, yeah, super fun.

After leaving for L.A. to pursue her star-studded dreams Miller returned to Toronto because she missed her family, landing a job at Much Music and not looking back. The newlywed married musician Dallas Green of Alexisonfire last year and together the couple probably gets more party invites in a month than most of us get all year. So when Miller punches out every night, where does she go? Home of course, to bake and watch TV.

Anna Willats approaches life through her political filter: from the serious, like her 19-year stint working at Toronto's Rape Crisis Centre, to the social, like dancing in Caribana as a mischief-making Blue Devil, splashing revellers with blue paint.

Growing up in Milton, Willats's passion for social justice issues was ignited at 17-years of age. She was at a town hall meeting convened by the late, crusading anti-abortion, anti-queer Baptist preacher, Ken Campbell to block a visit by a gay man and a lesbian to her high school to "rap" about homosexuality. "I was not identifying as homosexual, and I thought I didn't know anybody who was queer, but I really reacted to the hate in this guy, I just couldn't understand that level of hatred," says Willats.