Doug’s Body Shop on Woodward Avenue just north of the Detroit border went both ways: It was a family-oriented burger joint by day, gay discotheque by night.

It had Motor City-inspired booths made out of real antique classic car shells, with tables and facing seats built into them. Old state license plates hung on the walls, with nostalgia-inducing taglines like “Michigan: Winter Wonder Land.” And then it had a strobe-dazzled dance floor with mirrorballs and neon.

One night in the mid-1990s I was there when Doug’s two worlds collided. Just after 10 PM, a couple dozen gay people were drinking and dancing with one another, while a mere 20 feet away, in a more brightly lit area adjacent to the dance floor…

…A child’s birthday party was just wrapping up.

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Doug’s Body Shop and Burgeria went out of business in the late 1990s.

Maybe with the normalizing and mainstreaming of gay life that’s been happening in the last 10 years, we will someday again see “traditional family restaurant by day/debauched gay bar by night” hybrids. It’s possible.

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When I was a kid growing up in suburban Detroit in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t go to gay bars for our birthdays. You wanna know what? We went to Farrell’s!

Farrell’s was the chain of food & drink emporia where all the kids wanted to go for their birthday party. It had locations all over Metro Detroit (and in some other states, I gather).

They served hamburgers, hot gooey ’za, ice cream, cake, whatever junk you wanted.

The décor at Farrell’s was an unironic admixture of the “Gay ’90s,” the circus, and Mardi Gras. There was a mouthboggling candy shop by the cash register, too, with huge all-day lollipops, daunting mounds of rock candy — and stick candies selling for an olde-tyme 10¢ price: Horehound and sassparilla were my favorites because those flavors were unavailable anywhere but here and certain historical museums. If you knew how, you could suck the end into a really sharp point and stab people with them.

Birthday parties at Farrell’s were the children’s equivalent of decadent bacchanalia. Pizza! Burgers! Pop! And the birthday cake to beat all cakes: “The Trough”: a gigantic ice cream sundae (and mondae, and tuesdae…) lit up all wild with sparklers, candles and sprinkly toppings, carried out to you on a stretcher by the teenaged waiters and waitresses with straw hats and names like Cheryl, Rusty and Todd.

I found this on the Web, with the slug "Farrell'sJohnDec77" - This is NOT Rusty! Rusty is a fictional composite.

All of them had to put down whatever they were doing to join in putting on this spectacle. The tschotches and doodads on the wall spun around, and sirens and bells sounded off all over the restaurant. The leader of the birthday line carried a big bass drum and as he or she pounded on it they all sang their way to your table. It was terrifying how long you were kept in the spotlight, as the whole restaurant watched your spectacular birthday feast. If you accepted the Trough Challenge, you had to eat it all. This took a long time, but everyone just kept watching.

I was suspicious of these teenaged servers. I think they liked frightening the birthday child. I can envision them all in the kitchen laughing at me, listening to Donna Summer, being sexually innappropriate with the food. I definitely didn’t want to be like them when I got older.

Farrell’s closed all of its doors around the time Doug’s Body Shop opened, in the 1980s.

From a 1970s re-imagining of the “Gay ’90s” (1890s) — Farrell’s … to a gay bar in the next “Gay ’90s” (1990s) — Doug’s Body Shop — playing 1970s disco music and seating people in classic car shells … Retro, nostalgia, tricks: blur, blur, blur. Where is the thread?

And why did the child’s birthday party at Doug’s disturb me so much and stick in my mind all these years?

Could it be possible that one of those same waiter-performers (Rusty?) from my birthday party at Farrell’s of Farmington Hills in 1977 was at Doug’s Body Shop of Ferndale the night of that poor child’s birthday party in 1997? Maybe Rusty was sitting in a car-shaped booth alone or shaking his now middle-aged booty to a Gloria Gaynor remix in a remote corner of the dance floor? Rusty the scary (to me) big-kid waiter at Farrell’s Ice Cream -> Russell the creepy (to me) older guy at Doug’s Body Shop?

Am I the thread?

It’s possible. But I don’t like to think about it.

Tags: Detroit, Donna Summer, Doug's Body Shop, Farrell's, horehound, Michigan