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How come there’s no pizza in stories like Cinderella or Snow White? Can we fix that? Pizza hardly ever turns up in old-fashioned fairy tales. We obviously need to write some new variations of our own.

In “Pizza Theme & Variations” (pages 10 & 11), we can see a witch adding disgusting ingredients to Witches’ Pizza… watch Jack delivering a Party-Size up the beanstalk… and spy on Goldilocks sampling the three bears’ three pizzas, not porridge.

Rewrite some other fairy tales or folk lore with pizza. Why couldn’t castles have had pizza ovens for the Princess’s pizza? Wouldn’t Little Miss Muffet be tired of “curds and whey” anyway?

And what if the cottage that Hansel and Gretel stumbled across in the forest wasn’t made from candy but... pizza! I ask kids what we’d use if we were illustrating this story together. What would the shingles on the roof be, the yellow walls of the house, the window frames, the doorknob?

While I was illustrating the cover of Nothing Beats A Pizza, I spent a lot of time trying to decide which pizza ingredients to use for the eyes (finally deciding on onion and pepperoni), how to make the nose (so obvious—a mushroom slice!), what to use for lips (strips of green pepper? Okay.). It was so much fun, I started handing out a pizzaface outline when I visited schools so kids could draw their own. The variations were endless! Some classes taped up their pizza faces all the way around the cafetaria. You can see some of them on the coloring page, and download a printout of the outline for yourself.

Almost every letter I received from kids about Nothing Beats A Pizza included their name forwards and backwards, with an illustration of their real selves and one of their backwards selves, with the labels. This one is from Robin. Have a look at the poem “Backwards Me, Backwards You” on page 7 of the book and try it out for your own name. Check out this whole bulletin board of forwards and backwards pictures.

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