I took the girls to see Disney on Ice tonight.

What can I say? The tickets were free. Back in the day, I could score concert tickets and baseball tickets through work, but now all that’s pretty much gone, except, oddly, Disney on Ice tickets. I can always get those.

So we went. It was pretty bad. When Annabelle was 2 or so, we saw the classic Disney Princesses on Ice, a marketing extravaganza to be sure (what the F are all the princesses doing hanging out together? I don’t get it) but at least that was all contained in one category.

Tonight’s “Disneyland Adventure” was a trainwreck – the set up is that The Incredibles go to Disneyland and wind up having to save it. Painful. There’s no way to make The Incredibles do anything, well, incredible on ice (at least not this cast — many of them kept falling) so all you’re left with is one big product shot for Disneyland. It’s also hard to recreate Disneyland itself on an ice rink in Phoenix.

So I focused on making fun of it — the plot (lame); the costumes (too revealing); the music (trying too hard to appeal to the parents with allegedly hip music, like “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads – and whose idea was it to play “I’m Too Sexy” for a group of pre-schoolers, when Mr. Incredible gets his costume?) . You get the idea.

Annabelle, too, seemed pretty lukewarm about the whole thing. Not Sophie. From the beginning, she was all over it. She picked out her Mickey Mouse underpants  (worn backward, of course, so Mickey was in the front) to wear, along with a Disneyland tee shirt, and stayed wide awake, even though it was dark and past her bedtime (who schedules a kid show for 7:30 pm?) and she’s fighting a cold.

As long as Mickey was onstage (and he was quite a bit, though mostly in a “laser cage” waiting to be freed by The Incredibles), Sophie was captivated. She barely asked to use the bathroom. (That’s her trick to get out of anything and everything, these days. You try saying no to a kid who insists she has to poop.)

Sophie’s only complaint was that she didn’t get to hug Mickey, but she didn’t even really seem to mind that. She was just happy to be there, in the presence of Disney. And when I stopped bitching and watched Sophie watch the performance — felt her dance on my lap to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” music — I have to admit that I was happy, too.

Definitely worth the price of admission (heh heh), even if you add in $10 for cotton candy, $6 for popcorn, $4 each for water bottles and $15 to park.

After the show, some Disney employee handed the girls commemorative patches, or what I’d call free advertising. Annabelle tossed hers to me and I shoved it in my purse. When we got home and I opened the car door to get Sophie out, she was snoring loudly, cross-legged in her Converse, clutching her patch. I carefully pried it out of her fingers and left it on the kitchen table, for tomorrow.