San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Neighbors’ bucket brigade is a bar
How the quarantine led to a weekly gathering, fueled by pulleys, ropes and cocktails, that turned strangers into friends
Like all good debaucherous nights, it starts out tame. It’s 6 p.m. on a foggy Saturday when Judy Tsang leans out the back window of her Hayes Valley apartment. “How was your week?” she calls to her neighbors a few windows over. Tom Broxton is busy pouring brandy, while Sarah Hingston arranges a platter of homemade bruschetta.
It’s a bit like “The Muppet Show”: windows keep opening and heads keep popping out of them. While bars in San Francisco remain closed due to coronavirus concerns, this apartment building is picking up the slack. Cocktail shakers and ice appear on banisters alongside lemons, bottles of rye and absinthe. Tonight’s theme is “speakeasy,” and everyone has dressed the part: newsie vests, red lipstick and flapperinspired headwear.
Between the small talk, ropes and carabiners emerge, tossed from windowsill to windowsill with practiced ease. Festive string lights are attached to railings. And then there’s the star of the show. It’s gray and plastic, and typically found in a janitor’s closet.
But when you accept an invitation to Bucket Bar — a weekly event for which a group of about 10 San Francisco neighbors have perfected a lofi, socially distant system for sending cocktails sailing through the air between their apartments — it should come as no surprise that the bucket is king.
“HoistING!” yells Broxton, as he maneuvers a big jar of mezcal cocktail skyward to his upstairs neighbor, Matthew Zavislak, who retrieves it, removes the lid and pours himself a glass. Someone fetches a Bluetooth speaker, and soon they’re all passing snacks and laughing and blasting Britpop into the crisp air.
It’s a Saturday night in June of 2020, and three months ago, none of these people knew each other. But three months ago, they didn’t need to.
“I was losing it a little bit,” says Zavislak, a software developer who’s lived here for eight years, of Bucket Bar’s origins. He lives alone and was having a frustrating time with remote work. One day in April, he decided to make a catapult out of a bungee cord and launch a rubber ball into his friend Connie’s window across the way. Instead, he hit the window of a different neighbor, Laura Thornton.
“She came out and was like ‘What the f—,’ ” he recalls with a laugh. “But then she was bored as hell, and I was bored as hell, so we started talking.” As they did, other neighbors leaned their heads out their windows, too.
At that point Thornton, a speech pathologist with Oakland Unified School District, had been testing the limits of jigsaw puzzles to stay busy. She and her wife, designer Alexis Bustos, were intrigued by the idea of a catapult competition — and their roommate, musician and game designer Matthew Stein, has a penchant for mixology. A group text started. Broxton, an avid rock climber, offered his ropes and carabiners. Connie and Brian McGrath joined in, supplying each participant
with artisanal hand sanitizer from Veer & Wander, Connie’s (currently shut down) apothecary and salon.
Each week, they finetuned the mechanics of the system, eventually incorporating three buckets that could each move a different direction among apartments as needed. When a new neighbor joined, they rejiggered the ropes to get a bucket to their window. As the happy hour took shape, each Saturday became another chance to “level up,” says Zavislak — to improve upon last week’s party and outdo each other with contributions.
Everyone brings booze to share, but otherwise certain specialties have emerged. Hingston is the lead chef, carefully packaging her homemade appetizers into takeout containers before sending them through the air. For birthdays, Stein plays the fiddle. Around 8 p.m. each Saturday, Tsang asks, “So what are we doing next week?” and attendees confer about a theme, usually centered on a spirit. The week they wanted to taste rums, for example, they went with pirates. For Memorial Day, they held Bucket Bar and Grill, with burgers cooked to order and wrapped in parchment for bucket delivery. On “Lost in Translation” night, they drank sake, ate homemade vegetarian sushi, donned colorful wigs and aimed a projector at their building wall in order to sing karaoke.
It’s a motley crew, born of necessity. Ages range from 20s to 50s, and some participants have little in common aside from an address. But at a time when dining or drinking out means navigating an evershifting patchwork of regulations and glorified sneeze guards, there’s an easy grace to their shenanigans. The building’s exterior is a playground. Shortbread cookies arrive by bungee cord. A pack of cigarillos appears from someone’s trip to Portugal.
It’s simple, thrilling and illicitfeeling in a teenage way, like a 21st century Robinson Crusoe: the kind of thing kids imagine adults do when kids go to sleep.
“Honestly, it’s breathed so much life into me,” says Tsang, who works in event programming for documentary films. “I live by myself, and just having friends to talk to facetoface ... I look forward to it every week.” Tsang has lived in the building for about 10 years, but before the pandemic, her interactions were limited to the occasional “hi” in the halls. If it weren’t for coronavirus, she says, “I never would have known my neighbors were cool.”
Indeed, at this particular evening’s Bucket Bar, an air of wistfulness seems to have settled over the group. Perhaps it’s this week’s levelup: pocketsize newspapers distributed at the start of the evening, complete with a buckettheme crossword, a bucket list of past Bucket Bar treats, and a quarantine advice column called “Dear Liza.” (Sample advice: There’s nothing wrong with elasticwaist pants.)
Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that Bucket Bar, like so much of 2020, is temporary. “I know I’m going to remember this time very fondly,” says Hingston softly, sometime past 9, as the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” rings out into the night. They dropped the news at a previous Bucket Bar: She and Broxton, who seem to have lived several mysterious, vaguely rock ’n’ roll lives in Europe before settling in S.F. six years ago, are moving back to Zurich in a few weeks. And after nine years in the city, Thornton and Bustos are relocating to Oakland, their first place as a married couple without roommates.
But Zavislak, for his part, is hopeful that some of this will stick — even after quarantine ends, when Saturday nights come with the possibility of real bars. There are encouraging signs. Sarah Coburn, who moved in a few weeks ago from Amsterdam, has already blended seamlessly into the crew. “I was worried about meeting people,” says Coburn, “but then I just opened my window and —” she gestures at her friends, making a sound like the heavens just opened up.
For now, it’s just after 10, and there are glasses in need of refills. There’s a bucket to be passed; there are five conversations happening at once. Another platter of baguette and hummus appears. Tina from the third floor has joined in with a bottle of Moscato. The plan for next week will be a Pride theme, they all agree; there will be rainbow lighting, and Bustos will DJ. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” comes over the speaker then, and everyone tries to hit the high note, as people on their third sazerac are wont to do.
It’d be a cliche at any other bar in San Francisco, at any other time, during any other year. But here, for a moment, it’s just about the sweetest sound in the world.