Date formatting question

I need to reformat the output of the 'dates' field from '2009-04-08' to 
'Wed. Apr. 8th'. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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for ($counter = 0; $counter < mysql_num_rows($resultID); $counter++);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($resultID))
{
     print "<tr>";
     print "<td>" . $row->dates . "</td>";
     print "<td>" . $row->times . "</td>";
     print "<td>" . $row->am_pm . "</td>";
     print "<td>" . $row->height . "</td>";
     print "<td>" . $row->cond . "</td>";
     print "</tr>";
}