A long time ago, in a far-away land called Silicon Valley, a group of moms got together and formed an online blogging group. They called themselves Silicon Valley Moms, and they wrote about their lives as mothers –which meant they wrote about politics and religion, schools and shoes, husbands and hairdos, and, yes, their kids.  The group grew and grew until there were blogging communities in just about every major metropolitan area in the country, including New York.

I wrote for this group, which was the beginning of taking myself seriously as an online writer—and I know other writers in the group felt the same way.  But unfortunately, like all good stories, this group came to an end last summer (although the posts are still up here), just after an amazing event for all the area writers: we met to talk about online writing, about the role of the blogosphere (which reminds me always of a bathysphere, an underwater submersible—perhaps not an awful metaphor for parenthood, come to think of it), and we were introduced to tons of great products for women and families.

One of the giveaways at that event were tickets to Wicked—and even though I’d seen the original cast (Idina Menzel, before she was simply “Rachel’s mother” on “Glee”), I thought the show might be a good way to introduce Liam to the spangly world of the musical.

So last week, we used our free tickets and hit the Wednesday matinee. (Yes, I pulled my kid out of school to go to a Broadway show. Isn’t that why we live in New York?) Our seats were great – just off center, in the orchestra—and although I don’t think the current singers quite hit the mark established by Idina and Kristin Chenoweth—the show worked its magic on my 5th grade son.

Because he’d spent all of July with the National Dance Institute summer scholarship program, Liam loved the choreography, but what he wanted to talk about afterwards was the very premise itself: that someone could take an established story and spin it in another direction. I reminded him that the entire “Star Wars” mythography works that way: stories multiply outwards, backwards, forwards, in an apparently endless profusion.  “That’s not the same,” he said. “It’s different characters, not totally different perspectives.”

Smart kid.

After the show, we skipped the bows so he could duck into the bathroom and whip on his soccer uniform.  We negotiated the theater traffic and subways and got ourselves to his Lower East Side practice field on time (itself a bit of a magic trick). As he ran across the field to join his team, I could hear him singing (loudly and off-key, the way he sings everything): “I think I’ll try de-FYING gra-VITY…deFYING gra-VITY…”

Not sure what his coach thought about his Idina-channeling midfielder, but I loved it.

Thanks, Silicon Valley Moms.