Linda Longstreth has fond memories of April Fool’s Day. As far back as she can remember, her family would always come up with a prank or two to bring everyone a smile.

Last year, the Palo Alto resident woke to find her car was covered with plastic Easter eggs, held on by magnets.

Another year, she and her husband had friends over for dinner and ditched them.

“We started cooking garlic and onions, for the aroma, and then just left them at the house,” she said, laughing.

And this is no recent phenomenon. Back when Longstreth was 10, her father packed her lunch on April 1. When she bit in the sandwich later that day, there was a roof shingle between the slices of bread.

“And he was a dentist!” said Longstreth, a delightful 77-year-old who is sheltering in place with her husband, Steve. “Wasn’t that awful?”

Well, this year wasn’t shaping up for much mirth and merriment, considering the nature of social distancing. She has three grandchildren, but, like so many Bay Area families, they haven’t been seeing each other, up close and personal.

So, you can imagine her surprise when Longstreth peeked through the shutters Wednesday morning to check on the weather and saw that someone had decorated her picket fence out front with a string of funny little faces.

Her daughter, Sarah, and 17-year-old grandson, Owen, had sneaked over and crafted their prank after midnight.

“I’m calling them my ‘picket fence smiles,’” said Longstreth.

On the porch, a note said: “A reminder: Don’t touch these!”

The message was clear: The coronavirus doesn’t fool around.

The thoughtful warning and humorous gesture meant everything.

“They are sheltering at home, just like we are,” said Longstreth, of her daughter’s family. “But they live a mile from us in their own home. They are extremely cautious, as we are.”

But that didn’t keep a family tradition from being upheld.

“This one was extra special because it seemed to interrupt the concerns that were ever present,” said Longstreth.

Via her neighborhood e-mail chain, Longstreth told her neighbors to come up and see the display.

Just remember: Don’t touch.

— Al Saracevic

Danny DeVito’s face taped on all the family photos, mobile phones hacked to leverage a new puppy, and shampoo bottles replaced with maple syrup and Cholula hot sauce.

While most clear-thinking adults decided against executing April Fool’s Day jokes during a global pandemic — or at least against sharing them publicly — the children of the Bay Area and beyond were in full prank mode, taking advantage of captive parents to sow some work-from-home chaos.

Share with us the ‘good news’ The news these days can be sobering, even grim. There’s a lot of uncertainty and discomfort most everywhere you look. But amid the darkness, there are rays of light: young people helping older neighbors, musicians and fitness coaches offering their talents online, neighbors having outdoor dance parties (using proper social distancing). We’d like to know about examples of good news you have witnessed during this time. You can tell us your thoughts online at SFChronicle.com by using our Assignment Editor tool, or send an email (which can include a photo) with the subject line “Good News” to: metro@sfchronicle.com.

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(A personal note from this reporter: The shampoo switch was executed by my kids, who replaced every item in the shower with condiments. I didn’t actually lather my body with sriracha, but the water was on full blast before noticing there were no soap products in the room.)

Others were even more diabolical.

Twitter user @ajryan reported that his daughter “installed a chrome extension that changes all images to Nic Cage on my laptop. And she printed about 100 tiny Danny DeVito faces and stuck them over all the faces in pictures in the house. Oh, and changed my Amazon language to Spanish.”

@40goingon28 posted on Twitter a photo of a Post-it note with the words “Slap my Butt” and an arrow pointed downward.

“My kid kept coming up behind me and hitting me for no apparent reason then laughing,” he wrote. “Sometimes the classics really pay off.”

In a Tweet that went viral, @LibyaLiberty reported that her daughter hacked her phone’s autocorrect to turn the word “no” to “yes,” then the daughter tried to use a text conversation to trap mom into agreeing to get a dog.

“Earlier she asked me where I store the food dye,” @LibyaLiberty wrote, “so now I have to stay on high alert.”

— Peter Hartlaub

When things get hectic, people eat pizza. And nowhere is more hectic these days than hospital emergency rooms.

So San Francisco emergency room doctors have ponied up about $500 and sent pizzas to their colleagues in hospitals in Italy and New York City.

“There’s something about pizza,” said Dr. Christian Rose of the Kaiser Permanante Medical Center emergency room on Geary Boulevard. “You have it at parties. It’s easily digestible. You share it. It creates a sense of community.”

Rose and his colleagues ordered two dozen pies for their colleagues in Bergamo, Italy, and at four New York City hospitals. He wanted to do it, he said, because he remembers how nice it was when other doctors sent pizzas to the San Francisco General Hospital emergency room, where he was working in 2013 after the Asiana airline crash at San Francisco International Airport. Pizzas have also been sent from San Francisco to New York docs after 9/11 and to Boston docs after the Boston Marathon bombing.

“It’s a tradition, and it’s a pay-it-forward thing,” Rose said.

With the pandemic spreading, he said he expects lots more emergency room docs to be sending and receiving lots more pizzas. What about all that medical advice that says high-fat, high-cholesterol foods like pizza aren’t the best dietary choice?

“At times like these,” Rose said, “that’s not the first thing on a doctor’s mind.”

— Steve Rubenstein

Al Saracevic, Peter Hartlaub and Steve Rubenstein are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers.