My senior year of high school, I got this crazy idea that I needed to do something memorable before I graduated.

I tried jogging through the halls in nothing but a ski mask and a sock, singing “I am the eggman, I am the walrus” at the top of my lungs, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

I wanted to do something positive, and I wanted to do something that had never been done before.

Via a long story involving a CD review, the Pep Club, a couple of friends who played guitar and a buffalo (live or stuffed … preferably stuffed … for safety reasons), I came up with idea of hosting a concert festival in my high school gym.

I was so set on the idea that I dropped a study hall and enrolled in an independent study to plan the event for an hour everyday.

The before-mentioned CD review was of an unknown duo from Zion, Ill., by the name of Local H.

After awarding it five stars and mailing a copy to Polygram Records, I received a phone call from the label’s Midwestern promotional representative.

“We’ve got to get these guys to Des Moines,” he said.

Well, I don’t know any bars or concert promoters or anything like that, I explained, but I do have access to a rather large sum of money in the Pep Club savings account. Why don’t we bring Local H here — as in — the school?

So the planning began, and after a few hectic months, everything had come together.

The evening was dubbed “One Night of Peace, Love and School Pride” (a cheap rip-off of Woodstock’s “Two Days of Peace and Love”), but when Local H took the stage that night, peace and love were hardly the case.

The 400 plus people who packed the gym decided to act not as concert-goers but as who they really were — high schoolers.

Moshing and crowd surfing became a part of my principal’s vocabulary before he even had a chance to figure out how.

A few songs into Local H’s set, I was asked by those above to go on stage and warn the over-anxious crowd that if the moshing did not end, the concert would.

Most of the students in the crowd realized the consequences of their actions and simmered down their dancing. But there was a bundle of kids who decided to chew up my words and spit them back at me.

The principal watched as they became more and more out of control and by the fourth song, he was on the stage unplugging the band’s instruments.

I suppose you could say I was a little upset.

Upset at the administration for acting so unfairly.

Upset at the student body for acting so childish.

Never in my life have the words “it only takes one sour ingredient to ruin a perfect recipe” rang so true.

Veishea ’98 may not be a perfect recipe, but it is pretty darn close. Coordinators have been putting their pots and pans on the line since the start of the year to make an alcohol-free Veishea a success.

Don’t be a sour ingredient.

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Corey Moss is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.