I'm old. So old, that when I was a little girl we weren't allowed to wear pants to school. (And unlike my best friends, Marybeth and Dorothy Parker, who went to Resurrection of Our Lord, I went to public school.) Instead, my sister Sherry and I would walk, in the freezing cold, to J. Hampton Moore Elementary School in Philadelphia with pants on under our skirts. (Or, if it was a day like today, our winter "leggings" -- the ancient-equivalent of modern-day snow pants). Then we'd head straight to the wet and musty "cloak room," where we'd first have to remove our ugly red rubber galoshes (under which, to our great mortification, were our plastic-bag-covered shoes). Then we'd remove our pants (being careful the boys didn't get a sneak-peek) before sitting down at our desks in our skirts.

When the weather was kinder you could find us, skirts a-flying, in the schoolyard, playing a game called Pizza Pizza Daddy-O. Funny: as of this morning, I couldn't remember exactly how the song went, or exactly what we did when we'd sing it, but when I sat down to write a post about a bunch of happenings on the local pizza-front (more about that later), parts of the song, hidden in the recesses of my memory, so to speak, quickly came to mind: