One of my old nicknames is โSally Buttons.โ
The backstory is that in the late 80s, when I first worked as a reporter atย Womenโs Wear Daily, the photo editor thought that was my actual name. This despite my byline appearing in the paperโs pages a couple of times each week.
Whenย one of the staff photographersย was sent to meet me on assignment, he pulled me aside and asked, โHow the hell do you pronounce your name? Because I read it in the paper and it says โSari Botton,โ but Anita in Photo keeps telling me to โgo meet โSally Buttons.โโ
One night soon after, when I was out with a bunch of friends whom I considered my East Village โfound family,โ I told the story. At the time it seemed hilarious. We all laughed, and the name stuck. The watercolor painting above is by one of those friends, Peter, from a birthday card he made for me in October, 1994, when I turned 29.
People get my slightly unusual name wrong all the time, often settling on the nearest approximation that is more familiar to themโSarah Bottom, Shari Barton, Sherry Boltonโwhich is why on Twitter I explain thatย my name rhymes with โLarry Cotton.โย But none of those permutations ever stuck the way โSally Buttonsโ has.
One friend got creative, calling me Buttons, Buttonomics, Buttonology, and other variations, nearly ever time we spoke. I found it very endearing. Some other friends defaulted to calling me โSally,โ which was also endearing, because it was my late grandmother, Sara Cohen Bottonโs nickname, and I am named for her. (She passed away two years before I was was born.)
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Thinking back on those East Village days, I realize how much Iโve drifted apart from people I was once so close with that I ate multiple meals with them around the neighborhood several days a week. We went to movies together, and to hear music, and we hung out in parks. We played poker on the weekends. We sometimes traveled togetherโa handful of us went to the Berlin Film Festival together to support the director, editor, and star ofย The Cruise, who were all part of our circle. Iย introduced a bunch of them to each other, and they got married, and relocated. Some of them paired off and moved on their own.
Theyโre all people Iโm still in touch with, to varying degrees, and of whom I am still quite fond. Our lives just took us in different directions, and weโre not intimate anymoreโwhich now strikes me as totally okay, and normal. The older I get, the more I realize how fluid and cyclical friendship can be. There are periods itโs natural and organic to be close with a particular friend, and others when itโs not, and the more all parties recognize that, the easier it is to go back and forth.
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