The phrase danced into my mind last month as I listened to the 460 people who turned out for the 25 Citizen Voices '99 forums on the Philadelphia's future, sponsored by The Inquirer.

The challenge posed to the citizens was to imagine a Philadelphia in the year 2010 that could earn the title of "America's Most Livable City" from the Places Rated Almanac. They were asked to decide which issues the city had addressed to reach that happy state and how it had addressed them.

Instead of rolling their eyes, as I'd feared, these folks dove eagerly into the exercise like teenagers given free pepperoni pizza.

In church halls, classrooms and community centers, citizens munched cookies and spoke with feeling about what they love - and lament - about their city. They dreamed bold notions and clever cures, then tested those visions against the stubborn obstacles strewn about today's landscape.

They made it clear: Philadelphia, for all its scarred blocks, empty factories and ritual corruptions, is a city that is good enough to dream.

By the end, dozens of themes had emerged, but five asserted themselves most insistently: education, safety, jobs, neighborhood quality, and citizens' connection with government. These now become the focus for the next phases of the Citizen Voices experiment in civic conversation: issue workshops this month, an "issues convention" in April, and a town meeting with the mayoral candidates in May.

Looking at that list of five topics, rendered bare-bones, you might shrug: Coulda told you that and saved you buying all those cookies. The riches, however, aren't so much in what citizens talk about when asked to dream of a better city, but how they talk about it. Here are a few threads that stood out from the multihued fabric of conversation the Citizens Voices wove in January:

The City that Loves Itself: "What struck me," said Julia Rota, one of the moderators who led the sessions, "was the love felt toward the local neighborhood. Citizens cherish the neighbors that help raise their children, shovel each other's walks when it snows and the corner grocery stores that contribute community togetherness."

Emigres affirmed the natives' frequent boast that Philadelphia is an unusually friendly city. Person after person raved about the city's "convenience" and "livable scale." All over the city, residents praised its emerald necklace of parks, its cultural riches and the sense of history embedded in its lovely bricks.

"Hey, We Can Put the Show on in the Barn!": Equally striking was the common yearning for what one person in West Philadelphia called a "citizen-driven city." Whatever the issue, ideas bubbled forth for neighborhood-based action.

"I was struck by people's sense that they are part of any solution," said Harris Sokoloff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead moderator. "Their sense of the power of citizen activism was genuine and waiting to be utilized."

Few counted on City Hall for solutions or handouts. What many citizens seemed to ask of elected officials was that they provide some resources, then get the heck out of the way. The grim bookend to this view was an oft-expressed sense of alienation from a political system seen as corrupt.

The Hip Bone Is Connected to the ... I confess to being stunned by the citizens' sophistication about the linkages between issues.

"People clearly see the city as a complex system of interacting parts," Sokoloff said. Rare, for example, was the forum that didn't cite mass transit as a key to any jobs strategy.

This savviness may explain one anomaly: A poll by our project partners at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, whose respondents included some of the people at the forums, cited crime as runaway winner for top problem facing Philadelphia.

Yet, in our forums, crime was often a minor theme compared to education or jobs or housing.

Perhaps it's this: Hit city residents cold with a poll question about problems, and crime will rule. But invite them to deliberate about solutions, and they'll talk less about cops and courts than about root causes. One citizen in East Oak Lane summed up the popular equation nicely: "Better schools bring better jobs; that means less drugs, which means less crime."

On to Harrisburg: Dreaming of better schools often brought citizens crashing into a wall of fiscal and political realities. As one asked, how can the city ever "get that deer hunter up in Potter County to see some self-interest in his tax dollars going to Philadelphia?" Stymied by that riddle, many forum groups latched onto a magical, two-word fix: Gov. Rendell.

In this exercise of writing "the history of the future," though, the names of this year's candidates for mayor rarely, if ever, came up.

For all their millions in campaign dough and their high-priced handlers, the candidates haven't made a connection yet.

The question is: What's the best way to do that? Fancy ad blitzes or honest talk about schools, safety, jobs and neighborhoods?

Reports on the January forums have been posted on the project's Web site, www.citizenvoices.com. We invite you to browse that site to see how your fellow citizens see the city and its future.