22 Illustration by Joel Burden
When I was 17 or so, I worked evenings
at a dentist’s offi ce. At fi rst, it carried
the thrill of a secret world: The offi ce
building was locked — just me and the
janitors and the whir of the auto clave.
Then it was stultifying. I worked for
only two hours at a time, but those two
hours stretched out endlessly, a canvas
for my teenage dread and insecurity.
The families I was calling with appoint-
ment reminders often mistook me for a
machine. I was there to develop some
kind of work ethic, but all I could think
about was the awful, oobleck- like quality
of time. I tried singing between calls. I
looked for constellations in the ceiling
tiles. What I remember working best —
what still works, when I feel the trapped-
bug fl utter of a panic attack starting up
— is foot percussion.
It’s a ubiquitous sound in Québécois
traditional music, a galloping pattern
that musicians beat out with their shoes
while playing, giving them a Dick-Van-
Dyke-like dynamism. If you wanted to
be fancy and ethno musicological, you’dQuébécois Foot Percussion
By Eric Boodman
call it podo rythmie, from the Greek for
‘‘feet’’ and ‘‘rhythm.’’ If you wanted to
be down home and colloquial, it would
just be tapage de pieds, or foot tapping.
In English, it’s sometimes referred to as
‘‘doing feet.’’ It’s the secret weapon that
allows a lone fi ddler to make a whole
room get up and dance.
At my high school in downtown Mon-
treal, my classmates were baff led by my
obsession with Québécois folk. They
tended to associate this genre of music
with the drivel piped into a touristy sugar5.1.22With little more than
six notes, a fiddler
can vault herself into
a state akin to flight.Letter of Recommendation