PHP/MySQL Date

So I’m pulling a date from my MySQL database which is formatted as a date. It’s in typical date format (2006-11-26).

So when I pull it from MySQL with PHP as such

date("M j, y",$ridearray['date'])

I get a “Notice: A non well formed numeric value encountered” error.

I guess the issue is that PHP wants an integer (epoch time deal), but I don’t have any idea how to convert that out.