Are you familiar with the old “Farrel’s” chain of restaurants? I haven’t seen any around since the mid-80’s, so they may be long gone. But they were something.
They didn’t serve particularly good food, but the desserts- ice cream galore, in more flavors than you could imagine, in larger servings with more toppings than any other place on earth. Sort of a “Friendly’s” type place. Except for one thing.
I don’t know how “Friendly’s” handles birthdays, but at “Farrel’s”, birthdays were the main event. When they announced a birthday, sirens would go off across the restaurant, and the entire staff would come out singing “Happy Birthday”, and the last guy in line would have a huge bass drum strapped to his stomach and pound out the beat. Party hats were placed upon the heads of everyone sitting at the birthday child’s table, amidst other fanfare and extravagant hoopla. For a kid, this was truly the most wonderful thing in the world (okay, early-80’s most wonderful thing in the world. For the modern Nintendo-animatronic jaded child, it might well have been boring as hell. But for us genX kids, it was heaven on earth).
So my father and my mother go out to dinner at Farrel’s one night with my uncle Charlie and his girlfriend of the time- don’t know her name, so I’ll just call her Denise. It was Denise’s birthday, and Denise was completely unaware of what having a birthday at Farrel’s was all about. So my uncle Charlie had decided to give her a sudden instructive lesson in the humiliation that was being an adult during a birthday party at Farrel’s.
So my parents and uncle Charlie and Denise are all sitting around the table, finishing up their meals and chatting when my father excuses himself to go make a phone call. In fact, my father was in on the joke and Charlie had asked him to make arangements so as to avoid suspicion. Shorty after my father returns, it starts.
The lights in the restaurant dim. A voice announces over the loudspeaker “We have a birthday!” and suddenly sirens go off across the restaurant. Denise, suddenly and painfully aware of what’s going on, begins to flush bright red as the entire staff wanders out with one guy in the back pounding his big bass drum. And soon, everyone is singing “Happy Birthday to you/ Happy Birthday to you/ Happy birthday dear Charlie…” and they go over at stand around my uncle Charlie and put a little party hat on his head as he’s vociferously protesting that no, it’s not his birthday, it’s Denise’s, honest, no, not him, her, and my father is laughing so hard at the little switcheroo he played that he falls straight out of his chair.
So now you know where I get my sense of humor from.
Postscript: About five years ago, I went to a restaurant with my father and my uncle Charlie. This restaurant was run by my second-cousin, and she came over to visit and talk with us. During the course of the dinner, she brought over the maitre d’ to meet us, and she told us that the maitre d’ was actually a trained opera singer currently between jobs. “You can imagine,” she added, “what it’s like when he sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of our patrons.”
Needless to say, my father’s eyes lit up at the very thought, and he excused himself from the table to make a phone call shortly afterwards. A few minutes after he got back, the staff came out and began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to my uncle Charlie; I can still remember the booming, operatic voice of the maitre d’ singing “Happy Birthday to You / Happy Birthday to You / Your brother made us do this / Happy Birthday to You…”
Apparently, my cousin had briefed the staff on what to expect from her family.
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
