It was a Valentine's Day gift to herself, to Torontonians - and to Adam Giambrone. Kind of.
The coverage delineating the city councillor's intimate indiscretions didn't seriously irk Sonya Popovich when it first hit newsstands, talk radio and the blogosphere last Tuesday. But on Thursday morning, while riding the Red Rocket, enough was enough: the newspapers were full of articles on what the former mayoral candidate had told the public, and his closest advisers, about his affairs as more purported lovers came out of the woodwork. And Ms. Popovich was fed up.
So Ms. Popovich, a purchaser at Toronto design studio The Works, phoned up designer Nancy Reid and commissioned 500 buttons.
"I slept with Adam Giambrone," they read.
Delivery from Has Marketing would normally have taken at least until the following week. But once she conveyed to her designer the button's urgency and topical nature, she was able to pick up her stash the following afternoon.
Ms. Popovich normally confines herself to observing the vagaries of municipal politics. But this went too far. She would have no problem with a city councillor sleeping around, she says (although she clarifies that she's actually a resident of Joe Pantalone's ward, next door to Mr. Giambrone's). It's the way the TTC chairman approached it that drove her to extreme measures in button-crafting: She couldn't stand the way Mr. Giambrone's long-time partner Sarah McQuarrie was reportedly being treated.
"I have a problem with Adam's stance on [the affair] I'm a woman who wears glasses - I could probably be a political prop, too," she said. "I agree with Trudeau that we have no business in the bedroom…It's not a moral issue - just say who you are. You're not a monogamist. That's reality. And there's nothing wrong with having many lovers."
She was cautious about handing the buttons out at first, just leaving a few with people who worked in galleries near her Richmond Street office - "I figured they'd be ballsy enough to wear them."
But people kept asking: Where had she gotten that pin? Where could they get one?
Ms. Popovich spent the weekend handing out her wares, for free, to anyone who promised to display the pins prominently. Old and young, men and women, TTC drivers and coffee shop servers and attendees at an erotic arts and crafts fair.
An elderly man on the subway near Lansdowne and Bloor asked for one, and pinned it to his winter jacket on the spot.
A group of gay men sitting in a bar on Friday night loved them.
One woman - "she must have been in her 70s" - insisted on paying $10 for eight she planned to give away at a baby shower in her granddaughter's honour.
"Most people say it's good. Some say it's a low blow, it's a bit mean. But most people, it makes them laugh. And that's what it's about it was really my Valentine's present to myself."
By Monday afternoon, she'd gotten rid of all but 200. She has no plans to order more, she says - because she wouldn't sell them, and has no interest in spending more than the approximately $250 the original 500 buttons set her back.
"My close friends think I'm crazy."
But she will be delivering them in person Tuesday to councillors' mailboxes - including that of Mr. Giambrone, who spent the end of last week in the south of France with his partner Sarah McQuarrie, but is expected back in town this week for a TTC meeting Wednesday.
"I'm just trying to engage the public…It makes people laugh."