No worries on highjacking the thread, as you answered my question (As did George) pretty darn quick.
According to a friend of mine who used to work at B&M as a draftsman, all the B&M auto shifters that support the AOD (That info is available at the B&M site) will work in the Thunderbird, with varying degrees of fabrication (Hacking) needed to fit nicely in the console. In other words, if there was no console, any of them would work in a mechanical sense.
The "Trigger" type shifters (Hammer/Mega/Starshifter) have a trigger that you pull up with two fingers that functions just like the side button on the '89-'90 factory shifter handle. The only difference is that you can also position the shifter handle so that it ratchets, meaning that if you start in 1st gear, you can hit the handle as hard as you want when you hit your shift point, and you don't have to worry about shifting past 2nd or even all the way into nuetral or reverse like the factory shifter. When you hit your 3rd gear shift point, smak it again, and you are positively in 3rd. You just watch your tach and bang out the shifts. If you have the Lentech valve body, you can even keep it from shifting into OD before you hit the traps, although at full pedal the AOD is supposed to stay out of OD anyway.
The quicksilver works the same way as a ratchet, but you have to cup the shifter knob and lift up instead of pushing the button or pulling up the trigger. Once you set it in "Ratchet" mode, you just hit it to upshift.
They are called "Gate" shifters because you physically have to lift the handle or pull the trigger (Nuetral and reverse are "Gated" off) before it will let you shift into nuetral or reverse. When I was into the 1/4 mile (Back when we had to chase the woolly mammoths off the track), you HAD to have a gate shifter with positive reverse lockout for your auto to race at the strip in the brackets. I guess more then a few guys accidently hit reverse at 80 mph and yard saled their drivelines.