We report in a mostly non-technical way on our fifteen-year collaboration with Fred and Sam Gitler. Combinatorics enters homotopy theory through actions of a real torus. In turn this leads to the existence of spaces called moment-angle complexes and their natural generalizations polyhedral products. Completely serendipitous events brought us all together in Princeton in 2006 and our work began with Fred asking a critical question, one which he had found to be ineluctable in almost all his work.