I’d never really heard the term 'bucket list' before the movie and all kinds of things raced through my head. Could it be a list of famous buckets or a list written on a bucket or a list of types of buckets? Answering this would take a bit of time.
It all started when I kicked a bucket and it wasn’t on purpose but some of my accidents make the most interesting stories and I didn’t die, at least not right away, and if people heard that I had kicked the bucket, they wouldn’t be thinking I literally knocked one over. This wasn't the first time I had a run in with a bucket and I knew it wouldn't be the last but knowing that we’ll all someday kick the proverbial bucket has created the need for the bucket list which has been popularized by the movie of the same name and if I did have a bucket list, I’d first put ‘get a bucket’ on it, for the list, and I would never want to cross everything off of the list because there would be nothing left to shoot for.
No one is really sure how the term ‘kick the bucket’ came to be but its rumored to have originated from a suicide by hanging where the suicidee would stand on a bucket and, after securing the noose around one’s neck, they’d kick the bucket out from under them thus speeding death up by a few decades and my first knowledge of kicking the bucket came from 1963s Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World where Jimmy Durante dies on a roadside and kicks a literal bucket and Jonathan Winters proclaims, “That guy’s dead, you better believe it.”
Buckets have come back into main stream consciousness with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge birthed, somewhat, by Jeanette Senerchia’s desire to bring attention to ALS, a disease which afflicts her husband Anthony. I inadvertently joined the Ice Bucket Challenge at a picnic last year when someone doused me with ice water and I had less time to brace for it than Bill Parcells at the Super Bowl. I had heard of the challenge and it wasn't until then that I realized that the ice bucket is not made out of ice, as one might think, it’s a bucket filled with ice…ice water really most of which went down my back and into my shorts, and sometimes there’s no ice, which is cheating, yeah I said it, and it was originally called the Ice Water in a Bucket Challenge, which would give you a triple phrase score in Scrabble, but that was too long so they truncated it to the one we know now, now know the one we know of now and you’d think a word like truncate, which means to cut off, would be a little shorter; it's longer than the phrase it replaces.
Many of the Ice Bucket Challenges are done with Home Depot’s famously orange, and not so famously and quite generic white, 5 gallon bucket and when I worked as a manager there, another manager objected to the colored buckets being in mixed stacks. I accused him, jokingly, of bucket discrimination with a mock, “I have a dream where white buckets and orange buckets…” I researched it and buckets have been around since the bucket itself and prostitutes used to collect ‘fares’ in them, that’s where the term came from, because the John would ask “how much?” and she would say “5 Sheckles”, equal to about 8 linear US dollars, and he would say, “that’s fair," so to be a prostitute lady of the night (aren’t Johns, and Bills for that matter, horny during the day too?), you first needed a bucketeer to make the bucket which would make prostitution the second oldest profession.
My earliest memory of an actual ice bucket was in a Florida hotel room with my family when I was a kid and the first thing I’d do after running into the room was to grab the bucket and get some ice. We never actually did anything with the ice and the cubes probably just sat in the bucket and melted which has to be pure torture if you're an ice cube and the ice bucket remains the only way for Hollywood writers to get their characters out of a hotel room.
And for moviegoers, there’s always been popcorn in the bucket and stories about teenage boys sticking their junk through a hole in the bottom so his sweetheart would grab it but it makes no sense as he’d be covered with hot melted butter and like Coke bottles in doors, there are probably way more stories than guys who actually tried it.
Firefighters have been using buckets for eons as it makes it easier to carry water than the previous way which was in the firefighter’s cupped hands; in those days Frankenstein’s Monster would have gotten paid more than Verne Troyer. For forest fires, they now use the big bucket attached to the helicopter and buckets seems to be taking over and there’s just about nowhere in life where I don’t see buckets.
The Salvation Army uses them around the holidays and bars in the wild west had people spit in them (the spittoon is just a fancy metal bucket) and my church uses them to collect donations and KFC uses buckets for chicken. Joni Ernst says she used to put a bucket over her head for no apparent reason and a woman walked the Paris Marathon with a bucket on her head. There is a buckethead signature Les Paul guitar and the guy on the subway platform flips them over (buckets, not guitars) and makes drums out of them. At the seashore it’s accompanied by a shovel and is usually referred to as a pail and think how hard it would have been to make sandcastles without them.
Watering cans for flowers are really just buckets with a spout and cat litter comes in a 40 pound bucket. The Great Wolf Lodge has a huge bucket which dumps what has to be hundreds of gallons of water on kids. Nickelodeon’s green slime probably comes from a bucket (I’m sure it doesn’t pour from a paper sack) and buckets on maple trees collect sap. The Wicked Witch of the West was killed by having a bucket of water tossed on her (the water issue would have made it tough for her to shower) and that movie might have turned out very differently if there was no bucket and they had to attack her with a spray bottle.
There’s the bucket truck and the bucket over a doorway filled with confetti makes for a great gag and I can’t imagine trying that with a pillow case, or a rolled up newspaper, or a glass bowl. Football players drink Gatorade out of a big bucket and dump it on their coach if they win….I’d like to know what they do to him if they lose....and I guess that means that NFL coaches were the first ones to take the Ice Bucket Challenge even though it wasn't voluntary.
Legos come in big buckets and I believe that a Barrel of Monkeys would have been more popular as a Bucket of Monkeys or Monkeys in a Bucket or Monkey Bucket or Monket or Bunkey; the barrel makes them so hard to get out and when the do come out, they fly across the room like when you open potato chips the wrong way. It’s rumored that Schlinder’s List was on a bucket rather than on paper. My friends poo-pooed that idea but, “Have you seen the actual list? Then how do you know?” And there had to be at least one bucket in that movie.
And buckets can hold almost anything: solids, liquids, gasses, that is if they have a top. When I was in middle school, my teacher was trying to explain the difference between gases, liquids, and solids and he read out of a text book that liquids take the shape of the container they’re in and he demonstrated this by pouring water in a bucket. I asked if sand and slime and hair and marbles were liquids because they would also take the shape of the bucket; he didn’t answer and made a note in the attendance book like a doctor with my medical chart; I got a D in that class even though I didn’t have a test grade of lower than A and it made me defensive of buckets and paranoid about kicking them rather than nervous around unintelligent teachers.
Buckets can be made of almost anything. There is evidence that the first buckets were made of animals organs and the first firefighters used leather buckets (which is the animal’s external organs). Over the years they’ve been made of wood and metal and in 1967, the first plastic buckets were fashioned with plastic tops not making the scene until four years later.
Buckets catch the water from the leaky ceiling at work and on a construction site the bucket is the urinal and the toilet and on a job site, you want to be really careful which bucket you open as I was unprepared one steamy summer afternoon when I was 16. The term bucket is used in finance as a way to quantify net downs as in ‘which bucket does commission go in’ and computing uses it to group operations. It rains in buckets and cars come bucketing into traffic. Electricians use buckets for their tools and fishermen use them for caught fish. They’re used to bail out leaky ships, well in sitcoms anyway, and have wheels on them for mopping floors. It seems the only limitation on the kinds of buckets is in the imagination of people inventing new uses for them. And maybe I should invent a new type of bucket. Perhaps I’ll make a list, for the bucket.
