Zou Bisou Bisou

  Last March, as Megan Draper sang “Zou Bisou Bisou” to Don, it all came back to me—the Yé-yé movement, Gillian Hill’s rendition. Because I am génération x I was a toddler when I first heard the song, a Fay Wray in the grips of a giant “French go-go” fist. I ate my vichyssoise in a highchair as my father took his pencil to the “French Unscrambler” and my mother watched Jeopardy. This was years before Alex Trebek would become host, stealing her heart along with William Shatner and The Matrix’s Keanu Reeves. Decades later, I had a thing for Oulipo novelist Raymond Queneau, though he was Parisian French, not Canadian, like Mary Pickford who became “America’s Sweetheart,” or Michael Ondaatje who wrote The English Patient. Hard for me to get that Leslie Nielson of Naked Gun was Canadian, or funnyman Mike Myers or singers Anne Murray, Alanis Morissette, and k.d. lang. My family was French Canadian the way Jack Kerouac was—New England, Catholic. We got our news from Peter Jennings who was born in Canada but now lived ici. We watched Let’s Make a Deal hosted by Monty Hall, Bonanza episodes guest starring Chief Dan George, and Family Ties with a young Republican played by Michael J. Fox. American ads claimed supermodel Linda Evangelista. The only Canadian celebrity with an accent like my parents? Céline Dion. I didn’t hear a trace of it in the voices of John Candy or Jim Carrey or Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason. Today I want to sing it all—Brayon French, Québécois, Chiac, Joual, Michif. Little kisses of Acadian.