Life Cycles is completely finished. Since this is our 35th show, the process shouldn't seem like a surprise, but completing the production process always seems like a miracle to me.

Mixing the recording took longer than I expected, as I kept having problems with the volume of the songs. If the music is too quiet, you lose quality, but if it's too loud then it distorts. I had to redo several tracks over and over to get their volume at the optimal level. By the time I was finished, I tried to listen to the recording and found myself so tired that everything sounded awful.

After a full night's sleep I flipped it on and was really delighted with the sound. I'm so impressed with the skills of Brenda, Mike and Dana, and how good they made the recording.

This weekend we had a booth at the California Association for the Gifted conference. We had a sample disc for Lifecycles and a copy of the script, and many of the of the teachers examined it. They seemed very pleased, which makes me think we'll have a play that'll really fit into many classroom situations.

As a side note, I have to mention that an awful lot of people looked over Dude, Where's My Lung, which is our non-smoking play released in January. What we heard a number of times is that the schools have many non-smoking assemblies, which are usually terrible. And given that, who wanted to do more non-smoking material?

Does anyone know how to approach the people doing non-smoking assemblies? Because I think the play is something they ought to know about.