pygame: transparency question

[Scott Siegler]

Hello,

I have a surface that I load an image onto.  During a collision I would like to clear out the images of both surfaces that collided and show the score.  Is there a function call to clear a surface with an image?

One way I was thinking was to fill the surface with a color and then set that color as the colorkey.  Is this the only way or does pygame have a function to make the whole surface transparent?

Thanks.